Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  They moved through cycles like this often enough. Somebody would get too close or too mean or too something, and the other would say, I need a break—this is too much. Sometimes a week would go by; sometimes a day would go by, usually with Claire writing an email that began with, “Okay, I’m weak.”

  He tries now to put her out of his mind, but sometimes that is impossible late at night, when he is awake in his bunk, staring at the inside of his eyelids and making a game out of the images he sees in them: a thousand blinking fireflies, a stone dropped in a purple pond rippling outward, a red mouth—hers—opening for him.

  Trevor is still talking, sitting cross-legged on the floor and spitting sunflower seeds into an empty Coke can. The wind moans and snow skitters. When Patrick stares too long, when the night grows long and exhaustion overtakes him, he sees things. Darkness can have the same effect as the sun. When you look at it too long, it scorches into you. Blackened shapes play across your retinal screen. He imagines rock outcroppings into lycans, a pocket of shadow as a pool of blood. He imagines tunnels beneath the drifts and terrible things moving through them, burrowing toward them. And he imagines his father. His father, out there in the darkness, watching him.

  One of five MIA, the other seven in his squad killed. Lost to an ambush. Gone since November. Seven months. Seven months is a long time. Too long to hold out hope. This was his base, Combat Outpost Tuonela, same as the mine, same as the valley. Patrick requested to be stationed here, among the five platoons that inhabit the armory and hangar and dorms and latrine and maintenance bay and sump building and medical hut and laundry station and chow hall and Morale, Welfare and Recreation center (MWR), where they can lift weights and box and play hoops and poker and pound out miles on treadmills and Skype and check their email, all of these concrete buildings encased behind concrete walls encased in Constantine wire sharp enough to cut to the bone.

  Some call him Patrick, but most call him Miracle Boy. He couldn’t escape that, and with his shaved head and his uniform and his constant supervision, he cannot help but feel lost, known by another’s name, another’s clothes, another’s orders. His father is the only thing that keeps him centered.

  Movement.

  He goes tense as he spots something beyond the floodlights, moving toward the base. He says shut up and Trevor goes quiet. “What?” he says and when Patrick doesn’t say anything he scrambles upright from his place on the floor and nearly knocks his rifle from its purchase as he takes position. “What?” he says. “What?”

  There are more than one of them, a small black wave of them coming up the hill. Patrick has been here four months and during this time the base has been attacked only once by a single lycan who strolled up with a grin on his face and stood outside the gate and would not respond to their commands to halt. He wore an explosive belt and the blast ripped through a jacket lined with stainless-steel balls that peppered the concrete perimeter. There wasn’t much of him left.

  Patrick lines up his rifle and tries to glass them with his scope, but they’re moving too fast and he keeps losing them in the dark. He peers over his scope and adjusts an inch to the right, an inch down, and there they are. Wolves. A pack of them. He can hear them chattering now, as they close in on a white-tailed deer that stumbles through the snow, slipping and clumsily righting itself.

  He hears the click of Trevor thumbing off his safety. “Don’t,” Patrick says, but it’s too late. Trevor rattles out five shots and lets out a whoop. Patrick instinctively closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the deer is bounding away and the wolves are scattering, leaving behind one of their own, panting and bleeding in the snow.

  The radio crackles to life. “Post Number Three. We hear fire. Report.” Then another voice talking over the last, “Corporal of the guard, Post Number Two, we hear fire. Report.”

  Patrick shakes his head, knowing that the CO and half the camp are sitting up in their bunks right now, knowing that his squad will be punished for this, knowing that instead of rotating into patrol and heading out past the wire, they will be in for a week of bitchwork, washing dishes and burning the shitters. “Fire, Post Number One. That’s us. No alarm. Nothing but wolves. Wolves at the door.”

  Chapter 34

  CLAIRE IS LATE. Ten minutes late already for her nine o’clock class. Normally she wakes at dawn without any need for an alarm and goes for a run and drops by the cafeteria for a bagel or bowl of peaches and cottage cheese, but last night Andrea stumbled into the room after midnight wanting to talk about some boy and then ended up vomiting in bed, and by the time Claire stripped the sheets and cleaned Andrea up and Febrezed the smell of bile and rum from the air, it was after two.

  She pushes through the entrance to Carver Hall, a three-story concrete structure with tall, slitted windows, and tries to calm her breathing and quiet her footsteps when she approaches the open doors of the auditorium.

  This is Lycan History, a three-hundred-student lecture, mandatory for all freshmen and offered in the fall and spring by Professor Alan Reprobus, who calls himself an old hippie and refuses to use email or PowerPoint. There is a chair and desk onstage, but he never sits at it, instead marching back and forth with his hands seemingly cuffed behind his back. He wears jeans and faded T-shirts and motorcycle boots. He is broad shouldered and potbellied, with a trailing white beard and a wispy bit of hair ringing his spotted bald head. Over the past few months he has lectured, only occasionally glancing at his notes, on the origin of lobos, the intersection of biology and culture, the early communities and rituals and folklore, the genocide and near extinction of the race during the Crusades, westward expansionism, and World War II.

  The course meets as a lecture twice a week and then on Fridays breaks out into thirty-student sections led by a TA, hers a senior named Matthew Flanagan. He’s tall and thin and goateed and wears his hair spiked in front. When in class, his expression is brooding and he wears khakis and collared shirts with the sleeves rolled up, but she’s seen him around campus looking less formal, one time playing Frisbee on the central green, and when he reached up to snatch the disc from the air, his shirt lifted and she could see his stomach, the way it dropped between his hip bones in a muscular V.

  Today he is stationed by the door, handing out photocopies. “You’re late,” he whispers, and she says, “I know,” and hates him a little for scolding her. From the very first time they met as a section, she has resisted the authority of someone only three years older than she, never challenging him outright but never raising her hand and only reluctantly answering questions when he cold-called on her.

  She snatches the photocopy from his hand and it makes a snapping flutter and the professor pauses in his lecture and glances upward and catches her in the doorway. “Ms. Robinson?” he says, his voice booming through the high-ceilinged room.

  She freezes on the steps, not only because she didn’t know he knew her name, but also because everyone has turned in their seats to stare at her. Jackets rasp and desks groan with shifting weight, and though she keeps her head down she can feel the pressure of their eyes. Reprobus says, “Would you mind staying after class?”

  She nods and finds the nearest empty seat and waits for the lecture to continue and the students to return their attention to the front of the room before unzipping her backpack and withdrawing her notebook. For several minutes she is too upset—alternately despising her roommate, her TA, and her professor—to tune in to the buzz of the lecture or write down anything except for the black hash marks of what must be a jailed window or a game of tic-tac-toe that will never be played.

  Then her face snaps up and her pen tears through the paper at the mention of a name, Balor.

  She has missed the context, but the professor is talking now about the lycans—or skinwalkers, as they were known—among the nineteenth-century Native American population, and how they refused to acknowledge the U.S. occupation of the American West. The raids on settlements and presidios, the thousands killed or bitten, the use o
f the media to spread terror, the flamboyant acts of violence against soldiers and civilians alike, the scalps woven into blankets, a young girl half-eaten and hung from a tree by a meat hook. “In many ways,” Reprobus says, “very little has changed, the tactics of Geronimo repeated in the tactics of sixties revolutionaries like Howard Forrester and modern-day freedom fighters like Balor.”

  Her father. Howard Forrester. Her pen falls to the floor with a clatter and her professor’s eyes flit toward the noise and settle on her for a long moment. She has her hand over her mouth and tries to feign a yawn. She feels like a fool. His involvement in the Resistance is no surprise—it’s just so surreal hearing about him in the context of a college classroom. She needs to be more careful. Her only excuse is her lack of sleep. The professor is still watching her, his mouth open. He seems on the verge of saying something to her but doesn’t.

  A hand goes up near the front of the room and distracts him. “Yes?” he says. “What is it?”

  A boy in an Oxford shirt with a carefully parted head of yellow hair straightens in his seat. He says he’s interested in the professor’s choice of words. “You called Balor a freedom fighter.”

  Reprobus tugs at his beard. “I should have said so-called freedom fighter.”

  “I know you were involved with the Resistance in the—”

  Reprobus dismisses him with a wave of his hand and talks over him. “My history, outside of my academic credentials, has no place in this classroom.” He continues his lecture as if it were never interrupted. The boy with the parted hair raises his hand again, but after he goes unacknowledged for a minute, he drops it and slumps into his seat.

  Claire feels headachy and distracted and can’t keep her eyes off the clock hanging above the emergency exit to the right of the stage. The long hand winds its way to the top of the hour and the professor excuses the class and the students rise in a rush and the room is noisy with zipped backpacks and cell phones chiming with texts. Claire waits for the students to swarm up the stairs and then makes her way down them, to where Reprobus squares a pile of paper before fitting it into his leather satchel. She has never been this close to him and is surprised to discover they are the same height. “Oh yes, Ms. Robinson. Did I embarrass you? Calling on you like that?”

  She shrugs and tries to keep her expression impassive.

  “You seemed surprised,” he says, and she isn’t sure what he refers to, the moment when he pointed out her tardiness or the moment he spoke her father’s name.

  He smiles at her and his beard and teeth are yellow from coffee or the pipe tobacco that she can smell puffing off him. His jacket hangs on the back of a chair. It is horribly outdated, suede with leather fringe hanging from the arms. He pulls it on with some difficulty and throws his satchel over his shoulder and says, “You’ll be on time from now on, I trust?” and when she nods, he says, “Good, good. Because there are things about your history you don’t want to miss.”

  * * *

  Jeremy Saber does not know how much time has passed since his arrest. He has no clock, no calendar, and his fourteen-by-fourteen cell has no window, so he cannot keep track of the hours, the days, the weeks and months, all of it a maddening blur punctuated by the occasional cold shower and meal of tacky oatmeal or chicken and rice drowned in gray gravy. He knows, because of his mental fog and his inability to transform, a strong dosage of Volpexx must be ground and mixed into the food. He has tried not to eat, tried to hold out, but eventually his hunger possesses him. The lights remain on day and night and music pipes in at top volume so that he cannot sleep or think. His room is featureless except for a steel slab of a bed anchored to the wall and a stainless-steel toilet that sits in the corner. There is no sink and the lid of the toilet cannot be removed without a screwdriver, and he has on more than one occasion cupped his hand into the bowl and drank greedily when it seems as if days have passed without any food or water and the pit in his belly had to be filled.

  His thoughts are like clouds. He cannot sharpen them, cannot concentrate. Sometimes he talks to himself. Images float around him. His daughter throwing rocks in a river that sparkles with sunlight, plucking a dandelion and handing it to him, smearing her face with a red beard of spaghetti sauce. His wife, naked in the shower, smiling and looking over her shoulder when he pulled back the curtain. His wife with fireflies woven into her hair. His wife brushing back a strand of hair with a hand gloved in dirt from gardening. His wife curled in a ball in bed with a stone-cold expression on her face.

  He vaguely remembers his capture. He was at the safe house in Sandy—a farm set back from a county road, ten acres of oaks and firs and blackberry brambles and barbed-wire fences and rotten outbuildings and alfalfa fields gone to weed. Two days had passed since the Pioneer Courthouse Square bombing, and since then, he and his fifteen men had done very little except surf online and watch the coverage on TV and drink whiskey out of paper cups and toast to the memory of Thomas, who had so courageously sacrificed himself at the wheel of the van. That night, the giant Magog was supposed to be on sentry, but he offered no warning when the agents whispered through the tall grass and encircled the farmhouse and simultaneously rammed open the back and front doors and stormed through the rooms and slammed Jeremy to the floor and flex-cuffed him and tranquilized him before he could shake off his dreams, before he could transform.

  Then he woke in this cell. Whether a gun was fired that night, whether the others were killed or arrested, he does not know. He does not know a lot of things. Like where he is being jailed. And by whom. And why they haven’t questioned him. And whether the media know of his capture, and if so, how he is being portrayed.

  None of this matters to him now. He has made his mind purposefully blank. For the past few hours, Britney Spears has played on repeat over the loudspeakers, and he has developed several techniques for escaping the noise and brightness of his cell, for avoiding the trapdoor of madness he senses underfoot. One trick is to recite the alphabet forward and backward. Another is to create designs and patterns in the air bubbles hardened into the concrete walls. Another still is to imagine himself on a path in the woods and approaching a gnarled pine tree and pulling down on its branch like a lever so that a door swings open and then stepping into its shadowy interior and descending a coiled staircase to a muddy root-tangled room with a pond full of glowing fish and peeling off his clothes and going for a swim.

  That is where he is now, swimming in that underground pond, while at the same time sitting on his bunk, his body bent in half, his hands smashed against his ears. The fantasy dissolves when he realizes the music has stopped. He isn’t sure when this happened, maybe five minutes ago, maybe five seconds. His palms peel away from his ears.

  He startles when he realizes that someone is standing in his cell. Not one of the dead-faced buzz-cut guards, who bring him his food and who escort him to his shower and who will not respond to his pleas or questions and who wear uniforms that match the tons of concrete that surround him. This man is different.

  He is so tall that he must have ducked his head to enter the cell. His face is glossy with burns and his nose slightly upturned so that its tip appears to have been snipped away. He has no eyebrows, but the places where they ought to be hook upward like question marks.

  Behind him the cell door opens and two guards enter carrying aluminum folding chairs. With a clatter, they set the chairs up facing each other as if across an invisible card table. The man extends a hand, indicating that Jeremy should sit, and after a moment he slowly walks from his bunk and takes his seat and feels little surprise when his arms are seized and wrestled behind him and cuffed to the chair. Then one of the guards departs the cell and the other stations himself against the wall with his eyes trained on Jeremy.

  The Tall Man sets down his briefcase and then he does not so much sit as fold himself into the chair. He sighs and crosses his legs and knits together his hands over his topmost knee, and Jeremy notices that only a few of his chalky fingernails remain. “
I’m sorry I haven’t come to visit you sooner,” he says. “I’ve been busy hunting, you see.”

  Jeremy feels an itch on his cheek and goes to scratch it and forgets about the cuffs and the chain rattles when his arm stops short.

  The Tall Man offers him a sympathetic smile. “Now that you’ve had some time alone to think, I believe we’re due for a little talk.” He uncrosses his legs and leans over and sets the briefcase on its side. It yawns open to reveal a padded interior filled with gleaming instruments. His hand floats over them and then decides upon a pair of pliers.

  For the next hour they talk. The Tall Man tells him that he never wrote a book, that The Revolution was in fact a bound copy of blank pages. That he never led a faction of the Resistance, never had a wife or a child. The planes never went down. The bomb in the square never detonated. It was all in his head. The person he thought he was and the life he thought he built and the followers he thought awaited him did not exist. “You have been in this room your entire life and you will remain in this room the rest of your life. This room, this fourteen-square-foot room, is your universe. And I am your god. And as your god, I dictate that your purpose is pain. That is your existence. That is the only word of your vocabulary and the only sensation you are capable of experiencing. Pain.”

  Five of his fingernails are now gone, peeled away by the pliers. Jeremy thinks that after his fingers the pliers will go to his toes. He thinks that after his toes he may lose his teeth. He thinks that after his teeth there are so many places, so many pink and vulnerable places to slide a blade, rub salt, apply a jolt from a live wire. He thinks, maybe, the pain will never end.