Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Chapter 31

  THE TALL MAN STANDS at the base of a mountain lost to the clouds. A long stream of footprints runs from the woods to the open mouth of the cave, the trail hard-packed from the weight of so many men. The ice-stiffened drapery has been torn away and tossed aside. Three agents in watch caps and Kevlar vests are stationed in this clearing, three more at the power station down the hill. The rest of his team, two dozen of them, stormed the lava tubes more than an hour ago and have maintained radio contact. “Clear,” they tell him. “There’s a lot of blood, but nobody here. Over.”

  He holds the walkie-talkie to his mouth, close enough to lick it. “Nobody,” he says, not a question.

  A burst of static and then, “They’ve gone and vanished on us.”

  “No one vanishes. They’ve just blown off somewhere else.” His voice is soft and meditative, not meant for the walkie-talkie, which is already at his belt. “We’ll find them,” he says to himself. Something catches his eye and he crouches to pluck it from the stamped and polished snow at his feet. A twist of hair, bleached an unnatural shade of white. He kneads it between his fingers. Bits of skin dangle from the roots. He brings it to his nose for a sniff and then tucks it into his breast pocket and pats it. “And when we do, they’ll be dead.”

  Part II

  Chapter 32

  HER NAME—rather, the name she goes by these days, Hope Robinson—is written in bold black capital letters on the manila envelope, a rumpled nine-by-twelve, folded in half to fit into her campus mailbox. There is no return address. The same as last time, the postmark comes from Seattle. The same as last time, quotation marks surround her name.

  She knows people often punctuate incorrectly. “Employees must wash their hands,” a notice will read in a restroom, as if quoting someone, maybe the germ-phobic manager. But quotation marks around a name? That’s different, too strange to be anything but purposeful.

  Last time, she opened her mailbox to find a standard business-size envelope, and when she ripped it open she found and unfolded a lined piece of paper that read Boo! Nothing more.

  Now this. Claire holds the envelope with the tips of her fingers. When she flips it over, to see if anything is written on its back, she hears something solid slide around inside with a rasping noise.

  She stands before the bank of mailboxes, a few thousand of them altogether, each numbered and decorated with a tiny window and brass knobs tarnished from so many years of fingers twirling combinations. Normally the mailroom is busy with jostling bodies and student organization booths requesting signatures and volunteers, but at this time of night, the space is dim and empty. She can hear voices and music filtering from another part of the student union, beyond the marble arches and down a hallway, where the Stomping Grounds coffee shop remains open until midnight.

  She thinks about tearing open the envelope but feels too exposed. She tucks it into her backpack, along with her laptop, a spiral notebook. Her cowboy boots—slick black ones, Stetsons, a treat Miriam bought her before the move to Montana—clomp against the tile floors. The bulletin boards that line the walls are busy with flyers advertising bands, sketch comedy shows, student council candidates, lycan support groups. They flutter when she passes them on her way to the glass entry. She jars against the first door, already locked, and then hurries out the other.

  The night is cool and bugs orbit the lampposts and make their pools of light appear like crazed water. She zips her fleece snugly around her. In front of the union sits a fountain with four wolves arranged around it, their mouths bubbling out arcs of water that splash into a greenly lit pool. The union is aglow with spotlights. She learned during orientation that it has been here as long as the university, since 1875, and appears on the homepage of the website and on the cover of the catalogue, all columns and Palladian windows and triangular pediments, its classical style so different from the rest of campus, the Nixon-era architecture, square, featureless, riot-proof buildings with cinder-block walls and windows that won’t open.

  She follows the concrete path through the central quad to her dormitory. She keeps her hand closed around the knife in her pocket and her eyes on the bushes and pine trees clustered here and there, black shadows oozing around them. A blue-light security phone glows in the near distance, one of dozens positioned throughout campus. All she has to do is slam the red call button and one of the many guards patrolling campus will rush to her aid. They carry nets and Tasers and tranquilizers and pistols. This is supposed to make her feel better, but she does not. Dead dogs show up on campus every week. She has seen pentagrams spray-painted across the sides of buildings, choke chains hung from trees like tinsel. It has always been like this, she hears, but since the plane attacks and the courthouse square bombing, with anti-lycan sentiment at its peak, the campus is more than ever in the crosshairs. The other night Fox News ran a segment that questioned whether it was a training camp for terrorists.

  Funny, given the reasons she enrolled. “You’ll be safer there.” That’s what Miriam told her. Safe with a new name. Safe with a new life. Safe among her own kind. Miriam owed that to her brother. She knew a network of lycans and sympathizers who helped open a bank account for Claire with a credit union and secure the required documents, the transcripts, the driver’s license and birth certificate and lycan registration. “Not good enough to get you on a plane, but good enough to get you into William Archer.” She helped dye her hair chestnut brown. She bought her the black-frame glasses from Urban Outfitters. For the next few years, Claire—no, Hope—needed to lie low and stay safe and abandon herself to her studies. “Forget the boy,” Miriam said. She rarely referred to him by his name, Patrick. To her he was “the boy.” And the boy betrayed them. The boy enlisted after his father disappeared in the Republic. Claire wanted to hate him for it, as Miriam did, but could not muster the energy.

  Miriam would be in touch. She had business to attend to, and when Claire asked if that business had anything to do with Jeremy’s capture following the Pioneer Square bombing, Miriam said nothing—and has said nothing since August, the last time they saw each other at the Amtrak station in Portland, where Miriam gave her a stiff hug and said so long.

  “Not too long, I hope,” Claire said.

  This is October. Soon the cold will come and the bugs and leaves and grass will wither and brown and go white with the cover of snow. The campus is located near Missoula, in a bowl-shaped valley that butts up against the Rockies. Its location, combined with the architecture, makes the campus appear like a military compound.

  A half-moon glows. The sky is a spackling of stars and a plane winks through them and makes her think of far-off places, Patrick. Damn him. Every now and then they email. Every now and then she would google his name and battalion, check for casualties, but only when she couldn’t help it. Her breath fills the air before her with ghostly steam that she then passes through. Her dorm is one of five, arranged like a pentagon with a bench-lined atrium at its center.

  Her glasses fog over as she enters the building. Rather than wipe them off, she perches them on her head. The lenses are clear glass—she can see fine—but she knows that she ought to be more careful, knows that if she gets in the habit of absentmindedness, she will end up in trouble one of these days. She climbs the stairs and glances both ways down the empty hallway before keying open her door. She finds the light on but the room empty. Andrea is off somewhere, likely upstairs drinking with friends, despite this being a weeknight. Claire feels a mixture of relief and emptiness, the emptiness gnawing her out so that by the time she closes the door and shrugs off her backpack she feels like a chitinous husk that might crumble against the slightest pressure.

  A stripe of moonlight runs across the wall. She squints into it when she collapses her blinds to keep the night at bay.

  The wall next to Claire’s bed is blank except for tack holes and the gummy spots where tape once held posters in place. The books on her shelves are alphabetized. Her clothes are folded in drawers, the socks
balled and arranged in colored stripes of white, brown, gray and black. She didn’t used to be this way. But after everything that has happened to her, she has decided if life is going to be messy, she needs everything else in perfect order. She knows it is only a stupid gesture toward stability and she doesn’t care: it makes her feel better.

  For this same reason she can hardly abide her roommate, Andrea. There is a clear line that runs down the middle of the room, the floor on the other side barely visible beneath chip bags, lace bras and sweatpants and T-shirts, crushed cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi. Andrea has never made her bed, not in the two months they’ve lived together, the duvet always peeled back like a sneering mouth. The wall above it is a collage of magazine clippings from US Weekly and photos of friends on beaches or around campfires or at house parties, always with lips pursed, cheeks sucked in, always with arms draped around shoulders and beer bottles raised to the camera. It is this wall, more than anything, that makes Claire feel alone.

  She is absent of pictures. Absent of history. Whenever she thinks about her parents and starts to feel sorry for herself, she tries to make the choice not to feel that way any longer.

  She digs through her backpack and shreds open the envelope. The inside is a shadowy mouth that at first appears empty. She drops her hand in and her fingers close around something hard, a DVD that flashes when she pulls it into the light.

  She slides the DVD into the slit on the side of the television. The screen goes dark. There is a click and a whir as the disc begins to spin. She has no idea what to expect, her mind as empty as the envelope she tosses to the messy floor. She crosses her arms and steps back and nearly trips over a tangle of clothes.

  The screen brightens. She is looking at a building. The outside of what appears to be a motel, though she sees no sign. The camera shakes, a handheld. She hears no noise outside of the wind whistling against the mike. She can see very little besides the motel and its crumbly parking lot. Then she recognizes, with an intake of breath, the front end of a silver-and-black Ramcharger. It is parked before the last room at the edge of the brown one-story building. She can barely make out, above the roof, the green blur of trees. Then the camera zooms in on a door. From it hangs a silver number seven. The recording continues for a long time—what turns out to be five minutes but feels much longer—before the door jars open and Miriam steps out. Her hair is longer, pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears sunglasses, but Claire recognizes her stiff posture and locked jaw. She swivels her head, scanning the parking lot, before locking the door and climbing into the Ramcharger and barreling away. The camera lingers on the empty parking space another thirty seconds and then the recording ends.

  Chapter 33

  THERE ARE PLENTY of ways to stay awake, the corporal told Patrick. He could drink coffee and crunch caffeine pills. He could concentrate on his muscles, hardening them one at a time, maintaining the flex for thirty seconds. He could recite the Marine’s Hymn in his head: “From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli; we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land, and sea.” He could recall his orders as a sentry—memorized from the handbook—to take charge of this post and all government property in view, to report immediately to the corporal of the guard every unusual or suspicious occurrence noted, to halt and detain all persons on or near the post whose presence or actions are subject to suspicion. He could go on, but as tired as he feels, he is in no danger of falling asleep when on sentry duty with Trevor.

  Trevor is a nineteen-year-old private, a wiry redhead from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, whose talking never ceases and whose pale skin is darkened by freckles and whose jaw is always humped with dip that flavors his breath wintergreen. He talks about being a kicker for Tuscaloosa High and how nobody respected a kicker but they ought to respect a kicker because a kicker was quite regularly the difference between a win and a loss. He talks about Archibald’s, the best barbecue in the world as far as he’s concerned, though you couldn’t find it in the white pages and you couldn’t find so much as a sign out front, because it was a house, just a house, with all sorts of people waiting in line, people driving a twenty-year-old Buick and people driving a brand-spanking-new Lexus, all waiting in line for a pile of Wonder Bread and those ribs that would give your mouth an orgasm. He talks about the mile-wide tornado that went ripping through Tuscaloosa not so long ago and how he used to joke about the city having a church on every corner, but by God those churches stepped up and provided all the food and shelter anybody without a roof or a hot meal needed and how he was working at the convenience store when the tornado hit and the whole place collapsed around him and he hid under the register and managed to crawl out of the rubble on his own and spent the rest of the day digging other people out of their destroyed homes and apartments. That was something else.

  Patrick half tunes in to the endless stream of words. The night has his attention. The night that grows longer and longer, darkness outlasting daylight by many hours. The night that spills beyond this guard tower that rises thirty feet in the air like a gargoyle looming over the base entrance. Their post is unlit, but along the perimeter, floodlights cast a harsh glow that makes the snow sparkle and the barbs of Constantine wire gleam.

  Their M4s rest on a concrete shelf stacked with sandbags. The rifles are held in place by carbine bipods with a forty-five-degree swivel. Between them sit three bricks of ammo, a two-way radio, and a bag of frozen sunflower seeds. Patrick sometimes squints into the darkness and sometimes glasses it with his binoculars. The base is located on a hillside barren of trees and undergrowth, of everything but snow, a white expanse that drifts off for a square mile before running into the piney woods that channel cut through the two ridges walling this valley, fifty miles long, seven miles wide.

  Beyond the brightness of the floods, the valley is dark except for the half-moon peeking over a ridgeline and the faint glimmer of lamplit windows in the town of Hiisi and the hellish radiance of the Tuonela uranium mine. From here, several miles away, it appears encased in a globe of light. It operates day and night, a city of giant metal sheds. Red lights blink and black clouds cough from its smokestacks. He doesn’t want to ruin his night vision, but if he glassed the mine, he would be able to make out the railcars and tankers, the freight elevators and conveyer belts. And if the wind was right, he could hear the dump trucks beeping and grumbling, the big booms of dropped loads and the screech of metal against rock, the faraway thunder of dynamite. A train departs the mine, rattling up to speed, and releases a mournful whistle that gets mixed up with the wolves crying in the distance.

  The mine is the reason the base is here. The mine—and others like it, nearly a dozen of them strung throughout the Republic, all owned and operated by Alliance Energy—are the reason, some say, the U.S. is here at all. Some call it a war. Some call it a conflict, and some an occupation. Some call it a mistake and some call it necessary. Some call it endless. It is what it is—as it has been since 1948, when the Republic was established as a paramilitary lycan-majority state, and all the labels and opinions in the world mean nothing, Patrick knows, because nothing will change. The Republic needs the U.S. and the U.S. needs the Republic. They can no longer exist without each other, like an inoperable tumor that has fingered its way through a brain.

  The population is estimated at 5,507,300, all infected, a number that does not account for the 64,000 U.S. personnel stationed there, these twenty thousand square miles bordering Finland and Russia and the White and Barents Seas, a place no one wanted. During the short-lived summers it is pocked with lakes and strung with silvery rivers and bearded with forests of pine and spruce that during the long winters are invisible beneath the snow and ice and the shroud of many sunless days. It is a place of bracingly low temperatures and winds that can blacken skin within seconds of exposure. A wintry ruined mantle of a country with a hot, poisonous core.

  A space heater glows orange in the corner, giving off some but not enough heat. The thermostat on the wall reads fifteen degrees and th
e wind probably shaves it down to five. They aren’t far from an inlet, and when he first arrived, when the weather was warm and the wind was right, he could smell algae and mudflats, hear seagulls screeching overhead. Whenever the snow seems too much, when his lip splits and his nose bleeds on guard duty, when he has to knuckle the icicle off the showerhead before stepping under it, he reminds himself that in a few months, when it gets warmer, things will get better; everything won’t seem so forbidding. He imagines standing on a pebble-strewn beach and watching the wind whip the water into white crowns and wading out into the slow breakers and breathing in the salt air and knifing forward into the water.

  Now he wears a watch cap under his helmet and a wool sweater under his winter fatigues. Every now and then he flexes his knees and stamps his boots to shake the blood back into them. A stack of creased porno magazines sits in the corner. Some of the men use the women inside them to warm up.

  Every time he thinks of himself with a woman he thinks of Claire. She hated him for enlisting. Called him a hypocrite. Said he disgusted her. He tried to explain, tried to tell her about his father, but nothing he said could leaven her temper. There was only the unavoidable truth that he was going. It was a betrayal—to her, to his mother. She would not respond to his emails for months, until one day she did.

  Sometimes the two of them fire back and forth dozens of messages a day—and sometimes there are long silences between them, punctuated by some point of disagreement, often the differences between the infected and the uninfected. She would not let the argument drop. Just when he thought it was over, she would come back with another email about that guy who killed the old folks and stole their social security checks or that experiment where people happily electrocuted others or the child prostitution rings in Thailand. “But psychotic disorders are not contagious,” he would write, and she would write, “What’s that got to do with anything?” and he would write, “Everything,” and she would write, “All I’m saying is, there’s no difference between you and me,” and he would write, “I don’t bite people!”