Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  Failing sunlight falls through the window. No one is in the room, not under the beds, not in the closets. Her hand releases the knife. She closes the door and shrugs off her backpack.

  She nearly cries out when a second later the door opens and Andrea walks in, her flip-flops snapping, her body cocooned in a towel. She brings with her a cloud of mint shampoo. She sets down her shower-spotted tote and withdraws a pick from it and flips her hair forward and begins to rough out the damp tangles.

  As much as Claire hates to admit it, she needs her roommate. It would be easy to write her off as a complete idiot, but Andrea is bewilderingly smart with computers and graphic design. During orientation, she said, “Give me that piece of shit,” and stole away Claire’s laptop and spent the next two hours uploading software along with an extensive collection of music and videos, much of it pirated. She runs a blog called PinkGrrl. She does web consulting for a firm in her home city of Chicago and writes code for her computer science course while instant-messaging friends, and virtually every evening somebody knocks on their door asking a question about Linux this and Kerberos that.

  “Andrea?”

  “Yeah.” She twists her body and looks at Claire sidelong and flinches as she rakes through a painful kink.

  “Remember what you were saying the other day—about if there was anything I ever needed, to let you know?”

  “Course.”

  “I need help.”

  She has to clear away the mess on the floor to drag her chair next to Andrea’s. They sit side by side at the desk, their faces lit by the glow of Andrea’s iMac. Claire doesn’t know much about computers—Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, and iTunes are the limits of her technical savvy—but she has heard Andrea brag about this one, its quad-core processor and advanced HD graphics and FaceTime camera. Desktop Nirvana, she calls it.

  Andrea transfers the files from the laptop to the desktop with a thumb drive and opens the articles into so many windows the screen looks like a mess of playing cards. She then clips away the images from each PDF and formats them into Photoshop. All this with a rapid-fire series of clicks Claire can barely keep track of.

  When Andrea squints at the images and asks, “What do you even care about this old crap for?” Claire says, “It’s just a history project.”

  She wonders if Andrea can sharpen up the pictures, zoom in on this figure in the background—there and there and there—pointing at the screen.

  “No prob.”

  Claire isn’t positive what Andrea does next—the mouse moves too swiftly, the windows open and close at shutter speed—but it appears to have something to do with the density of the files. Here is the photo of the bodies on the street. “Nasty,” Andrea says and then zooms in and clarifies, zooms in again and clarifies. “Best I can do.” The face is blurry and somewhat pixilated, like rain-smeared newsprint, but they can tell he has a beard.

  The same for the other two photos. Andrea calls up the image of the federal courthouse, the image of her father, and they study the back of the man in the foreground. “I guess there’s nothing to be done on this one,” Claire says.

  Andrea shrugs her apology and then answers an instant message that pops up before returning to the photo. “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” she says under her breath and then drags the magnifying function over the entryway to the courthouse. A glass revolving door with the sunlight brightening it. Andrea drags it closer and closer still. She changes from color to gray scale and then messes with the lighting to dampen the glare. Clarifies again. The pixels rearrange into the reflection of the man with the braids. Not perfect, but focused enough to clearly observe him from the waist up. His face half-hidden by his beard. His jacket, leather fringe. Professor Alan Reprobus.

  Chapter 38

  MIRIAM HAD NO ALLIANCES—everyone an enemy, no one a friend—and that was a difficult way to live for anyone, let alone an eighteen-year-old girl. She had to protect Claire. That was what her brother wanted and that meant keeping her in the dark and pushing her away, saying good-bye, no matter how difficult it was to let her go. The farther away, the better, the safer.

  In the parking lot outside the train station, she closed and locked the door of the Ramcharger and sagged down on the bench seat so that no one could see her, and cried. She did not tremble—she shook completely. She permitted herself five minutes of this before straightening up and roughing away the tears and driving off without snapping her seat belt into place.

  It was time to get to work.

  Miriam had been doing her research. The articles she read about the raid—following the courthouse bombing—implied cooperation between local police and federal authorities. No names were released. The location was listed as outside Portland, but she knew the safe house was in Sandy.

  She visited PSU and walked around campus until she saw a girl of the same approximate build and appearance as her and approached her and smiled broadly and shouted, “Cynthia! It’s so good to see you!”

  The girl wore a hiking backpack that turtled her with its weight and size. “I’m not Cynthia.”

  “You’re kidding me. I’m so embarrassed. You know, you look exactly like her. I’m going to have to tell her she has a double.” She laughed in a high, shrieking way. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Kirsten. Kirsten Packer.”

  “I’ll tell her to look for you. It will be like looking in a mirror. This is so weird. Sorry, Kirsten.”

  Kirsten gave her a perplexed smile and adjusted the straps on her backpack and trudged off to class and Miriam pulled out her pay-as-you-go phone and dialed the number for card services and said, with a panicked voice, that she had lost her purse and would like to report her student ID card stolen. “Kirsten Packer,” she said. “That’s my name. Can you help me?” They assured her they could print up another, no problem.

  The building was a five-minute walk. She pinched the skin around her eyes to swell and redden her expression. Then she stared at the sky for thirty seconds until her eyes watered before pushing through the door. A kid with a short Mohawk was working the counter. “That sucks so bad,” he said. “I hope everything works out for you.”

  She tucked the card into the back pocket of her jeans and said, “It will.”

  She stopped by the campus bookstore and bought a pink PSU sweatshirt and drove the twenty minutes to Sandy, to the police station, where she said she was a criminology major at PSU doing a report on police raids and wondered if she might view some reports.

  She made herself look younger by pulling back her hair in a ponytail and pretending to chew gum. She had a spiral notebook in one hand, her ID card in the other. A woman with jowls and her hair done up in a jet-black helmet looked at the card, looked at Miriam, and said of course, so long as she signed in and paid the administrative fee.

  Within twenty minutes, she had the information she needed. Ten names. All local police.

  She made phone calls, fiddled around on the Net, drove through a few neighborhoods, before narrowing down her prospects to Ernest Hobbes, an inspector in Sandy; and Dennis Hannah, a SWAT team member with Clackamas County. Both single.

  In Hobbes’s home office, she finds a large stash of gay pornography, so she turns her sights on Hannah, a thick-necked man with a mustache who wears jean shorts and changes his own oil and drinks at the Tip-Top Tavern every Friday night.

  She drove to the mall and browsed the stores and bought high heels from JCPenney and a lace push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret and a short skirt and skimpy top with a scoop neck and a jangly necklace and earrings from Maurices. She circled the cosmetics counters at Nordstrom. The women who worked there all wore white coats as if they were doctors and when they looked at her plain face they twisted up their expressions in sympathy as if about to give a difficult diagnosis. “Can I help you?” one of them said and Miriam said, “Get me whatever lipstick, foundation, blush, and eyeliner you think matches my complexion. And whatever perfume you think smells good. Now.”

  At
home she laid everything out on the bed in the shape of a woman, the invisible woman she planned to become.

  Apparently she has a small head. She bought a blond shoulder-length bob at the Wig Gallery in northeast Portland. Even their smallest size kept slipping out of place. So she held it with her hand, as though it were a hat, when walking from her truck to the ramped entry of the Tip-Top Tavern. The day was cold, but she wore no jacket.

  Once inside, her stiff posture loosened into a slink. The juke played Johnny Cash. Somebody tossed darts in the corner. An Oregon Ducks clock glowed green and gold on the wall. She spotted Hannah at a high, round table, sharing a pitcher of light beer with a friend. She took her time approaching the bar, making sure everybody got an eyeful. She ordered a ginger whiskey and climbed onto the stool and crossed her legs.

  It didn’t take long. She sipped her drink and watched the Trail Blazers on the TV hanging over the bar. She sensed him before she heard him, the man in the brown leather jacket with the American flag patch sewed onto its shoulder. He was leaning against the bar only inches away from her. “Buy you a drink?” he said.

  She lifted her whiskey and gave it a little twirl.

  “Can I buy you another drink?”

  She shook her head, no.

  He said something else, but she was already sliding off her stool, leaving the bar, approaching Hannah. He and his friend had their eyes on her and their pint glasses half-raised to their mouths, frozen by her approach.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. “That creep won’t leave me alone.”

  “By all means,” the friend said. He was older, squarer. Black polo shirt and jeans. Badge and pistol clipped to his belt.

  “What did he say?” Hannah said and peered over her shoulder with a hard-eyed expression. “Do we need to teach him something about manners?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I don’t think he’ll bother me anymore now that I’m with you two. You two look pretty tough.”

  When Hannah smiled, she saw the gap between his teeth she didn’t know was there.

  Two pitchers and two hours later, she is in his car, a Dodge Challenger parked under a skeletal oak tree with a few browned leaves still clinging stubbornly to its branches. She has his zipper undone and the hard muscle of his cock in her hand. In the tavern, they talked about the shit economy, about the Trail Blazers, about her cousin who died of cancer, about her job as a hairdresser—and then she asked what they did anyway.

  Condensation dribbled from the pitcher and pooled at its base and Hannah dipped his finger in it and touched her on the back of the hand. “We’re cops.”

  “No!”

  “We are. We really are.”

  “Tell me, is it like in the shows? Like that CSI?”

  They laughed and shook their heads and said the shows were good fun, but real police work was a little less glamorous and she’d be surprised by how much Hollywood got wrong.

  “Tell me something badass you’ve done,” she said. “Something dangerous and heroic.” She made her tone half-mocking and half-daring and Hannah wiped the foam off his mustache and grinned at his friend and said, “Oh, we’ve got some stories, don’t we, Paulie?”

  “Yeah, we do.”

  It wasn’t long before Hannah brought up the raid on the lycan safe house. He talked about working with the prick feds and stalking through the grass and ramming open the door and charging through the house and finding it empty except for one guy. Who turned out to be the guy, the one who wrote that banned book that pissed a bunch of people off. “Weirdest thing,” he said. “Him all alone like that. It’s like he had been left for us.”

  She let her jaw drop lower and lower as he spoke and said she couldn’t believe it. “That was, like, in the news.”

  “I know,” he said. “It was some seriously serious shit.”

  Now, in the car, she can tell from his breathing and from the short little hip thrusts that he is close to finishing. She leans toward him and nibbles his ear and says, “Where did they take that guy? The one from the raid?”

  “What?” His eyes are half-shuttered with pleasure. “What do you care?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Keep going. Please.”

  “Where is he?” She gives him another pull and his whole body arches toward it. “Where is he?”

  In a rush he tells her FDC SeaTac, he’s at FDC SeaTac.

  She releases him and slaps him with the same hand and says, “What kind of woman do you think I am?” and pushes open the door and leaves him there with his mouth and his pants agape.

  Chapter 39

  AUGUSTUS KNOWS all about the eugenics programs. The Americans, from 1907 to 1960, sterilizing hundreds of thousands of lycans and homosexuals, the poor, the physically and mentally disabled. The Germans, during the 1930s and ’40s, trying to create an Ubermensch, a perfect Aryan, while at the same time playing God with the Jews and Gypsies and all those with what they called inferior blood, sometimes sterilizing, sometimes exterminating, sometimes experimenting—injecting patients with chemicals and diseases, exposing them to mustard gas, sewing together their bodies, immersing them in cold water, forcing them to sexually engage with dogs, striking their skulls with hammers to study head trauma.

  And he knows that the ACLU and a handful of congressmen and the demonstrators outside the White House are accusing him of the same. He tries not to give interviews—he needs Chase to remain the mouthpiece—but the other month, a reporter sprang out and stuck a microphone in his face and he couldn’t stop himself. “Everyone needs to realize that what we’re talking about here comes down to public health, public safety. All medical efforts are in support of that. AIDS is not a person. Mad cow disease is not a person. Swine flu is not a person. And lobos isn’t either. It’s a dangerous pathogen.” A certain segment of the population seemed to be in denial of this, as if lobos were a dangerous truth they preferred not to believe in, like an X-ray spotted with tumors.

  But he knows that he is correct. Knows without a doubt. That is one of his more upstanding qualities, he thinks. Absolute certainty. This certainty enabled him to muscle private and corporate donors into his corner, convinced the University of Oregon to risk the lawsuits they knew would come and then fast-tracked their endorsement of Neal Desai’s search for a vaccine and allowed him to manifest a research team in a semester’s time and named him the director of the Center for Lobos Studies.

  And now—only a hundred yards away from where he stands—the bulldozers and dump trucks and concrete mixers and men in hard hats and orange reflective vests are building the five-million-dollar Pfizer extension of the research campus.

  Neal’s team is presently working out of an old laboratory, the tile floor the sickly green of an old hospital ward and the benchtops—as everyone called the counters—black and impervious and covered in plastic-backed paper held down with colored tape meant to define territories. Upon them sit boxes of pipette tips, pipettes, Sharpie pens, personal centrifuges, a spectrophotometer, water baths, glassware, latex gloves, Kimwipes, inverted microscopes, safety glasses. Lab coats hang from hooks. Computer terminals glow in the corners. An industrial refrigerator—double sided, with an open glass front—hums next to a liquid nitrogen tank that registers –170 degrees.

  Augustus helps adjust a decapitated dog’s head—a German shepherd—into a vise on the stainless-steel counter. The fur prickles through his latex gloves.

  “Thank you,” Neal says. His oscillating saw whirs to life. It whines when pressed into bone, slowly circling the skull, which he then pulls off with the soft pop of a bottle top. He stares at the brain, blackened with prions like an old walnut.

  Neal believes he is here to say hello, tour the lab, pick up another carton of Volpexx. And he is. But he is also here to convince the good doctor to join Chase in the Republic. “Privately as his medical assistant. Publicly as an emissary.”

  “I need to be here to help with my family.”

  “Last I checked, your ly
can daughter enrolled in a rehab program. Sounds like she’s getting all the help she needs.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll pose for a few photos, give a few speeches. You’ll meet with Alliance Energy representatives—”

  “No.”

  “—who, may I remind you, are one of your corporate donors.”

  “My work is here,” Neal says, though his voice has lost its resolve. They both know it: he is no longer needed in the lab. He has more than enough people to carry out every duty—thirty of them altogether—the secretaries, the professors, the postdocs, the grad students. But this is what he loves most—the work—his eye pressed to a microscope, the smell of formaldehyde scorching his nose and the talcum powder from the latex gloves whitening his knuckles.

  “I don’t want to tell you what your work is,” Augustus says. “But I will if I must.” Neal always puts up a fight, but Augustus always wins, and these past few months the doctor has more often than not found himself behind a desk or on a plane or in a fluorescent-lit boardroom meeting with politicians, meeting with donors, meeting with faculty from other universities wishing to interface with their research.

  Then there are the interviews, him stationed on a couch alongside Chase, thanking the governor for his support and trying to explain, in layman’s terms, some version of the following.

  This is how you make a vaccine.

  Step one: Identify the infection. In the case of rabies, it’s the dog frothing at the mouth, the bat that swoops down from the attic rafters and savages a hand reaching for a light switch.

  Step two: Isolate the bacteria or virus. Kill the dog. Kill the bat. Cut off its head. Find the negri bodies, the black spots in its brain that look like rotten grains of rice.