Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  And sometimes, when Jeremy runs out of stories, he invents new ones, anything to keep the Tall Man from growing bored.

  * * *

  If his father was brewing, he had a workspace hidden somewhere on the base. Patrick feels stupid for not realizing this earlier. Months ago, when one of the lieutenants mentioned in passing that his father made a hell of a beer, Patrick figured he was a fan of Anchor Steam. He has a few off-duty hours to spare and spends them searching.

  He checks behind the mess hall, thinking the cooks might have hooked him up with space and supplies. He checks the storage rooms at the rear of the MWR. He checks the maintenance bay, the hangar, the armory.

  Outside the latrine, he turns a corner and spots Sergeant Decker marching along with that half-stooped posture of his. Patrick ducks back the way he came and knobs down the volume on his radio and waits for the footsteps to fade, and then his eyes settle on the middle distance, past the melted ruins of Lieutenant Colonel Bennington’s snow diagram, where he spots an old toolshed near the east guard tower.

  He has glanced at it dozens of times without really seeing it. And now there it is, like an old book on a crowded shelf that suddenly announces itself when your fingers trail across its leather spine. The wood is dark, weathered. Vines have overtaken it, gray with winter, like dead veins. There is a padlock on the door. None of his keys work—but a rock does. He splinters it away from the rotten wood.

  The lightbulb sputters to life, and its dim orange glow seems to bring more shadows than light. He drags the door closed behind him. He can smell the yeast coming off the twenty-five-gallon drums stacked in the corner for propagation. A waist-level bench is built into the wall. On it, Patrick sees a close cousin to the mess of his father’s workspace at home. Beakers, vials, droppers, jugs, and jars. Petri dishes. A rusted microscope. The lightbulb sizzles and then dies. He has only the winter light streaming through the window.

  On an overhead shelf, black binders, notebooks full of his small, square handwriting, the penciling faded and smeared. He flips through page after page and reads meaningless entries about yeast cells and blue cells and regions and dilution factors and slurry. He discovers among them a printed email correspondence. He only glances at them, their contents impersonal, a garble of chemical terminology. He folds them up and shoves them in his pocket to study later.

  He spots a moth perched on a table and touches it, and it crumbles to dust. He picks up a glass container next to it, filled with a powder that has long ago hardened. A strip of masking tape reaches across it on which is written “Metallo” in black pen. He sets it down and picks up another bottle, this one plastic with a childproof cap, and whatever is inside it jangles. He spins it in his hand until he can read the label, Volpexx.

  Something snaps drily beneath his boot. He steps back from the workbench and peers into the shadowy space beneath it and there observes the desiccated corpse of a wolf or a dog—it’s difficult to tell—the body sunken, the fur falling away in patches, the bone of its hind leg split by his weight. Around its snout is a muzzle and around its neck a chain leash bolted to the wall behind it.

  One thing is certain: his father wasn’t just making beer.

  He hears something then. A chewing, spitting sound. He looks down and his eyes settle on the radio. In a panic he knobs the volume to high and a static-filtered version of Decker’s voice assaults him. “All QRF squads report, all QRF squads report for immediate departure!”

  He has no time to think further about his father. He can only run. As he does—mazing his way through the barracks, every step sending up a splash—he joins other soldiers who pour from alleyways and doorways and pound toward the four-truck convoy waiting for them.

  It is Ukko, as expected. The gunfire and RPGs started at dawn and haven’t let up. They need backup.

  Patrick throws on his gear. He checks the crew-served weapon systems: the medium and heavy machine guns, the rockets and TOW guns. Checks the head space and timing on the .50 caliber to make sure the weather hasn’t made it swell or shrink and thrown it off by a few clicks.

  They line up next to their vehicles—four fire squads, two Humvees, two armored trucks—and Decker walks the length of them and knocks them each on the helmet. “Death on a pale horse, gentlemen. Let’s roll.”

  * * *

  Today the Tall Man leans into Jeremy until his face is the only thing. It is an expressionless face, a dead face, the skin glossy and colored different shades of red and pink and yellow and tan. “You’re wondering. But you’re afraid to ask. You’re wondering why I look this way?”

  The Tall Man asks questions and Jeremy answers them—that is their routine—but in this case he does not know how to respond. Will he be punished for a wrong answer?

  The Tall Man exhales through his slit-like nostrils, a long, deflating hiss. “It happened a long time ago. You weren’t even born yet. At the time I was a police officer in Chicago. My first year on the job and I was assigned foot patrol during the Days of Rage. You know all about the Days of Rage, don’t you, Mr. Saber? I’ve read your book. I found it a very interesting piece of propaganda. I am the other side of that propaganda. I am an asterisk in one of your chapters. I am what happens when an animal tries to play human games and gets itself into mischief. As you know, on October 9, 1969, a bomb went off in front of the capitol building. It injured and killed many people and drew many more police and spectators to the scene. I give the lycans credit for that. It was a clever bit of bait. I was there, dragging an injured woman from her car, when the second bomb went off. We were standing in a lake of gasoline.” He opens his mouth and blows into Jeremy’s face. “Poof!”

  He leans back and crosses his legs. His knees appear sharp enough to pierce the black fabric of his slacks. He might be smiling, though it is hard to tell. His tone is conversational. They might be old friends fondly remembering a moment from years before. “You might not believe it,” he says, “but I was once a handsome man. And you’ll like this. You’ll like this a lot. Your estranged and deceased brother-in-law is responsible for my condition. It was him. He was responsible for the bombs. Yes. That’s right. He was. He was never prosecuted for it, but he came to justice all the same. I made sure of that.”

  He seems ready to say something more when the door clangs twice. Somebody is knocking. Before the Tall Man can turn in his seat, the lock slides and the door opens, held by a guard who says, “Augustus Remington is here to see you, sir.”

  Before the Tall Man can respond, a short, pear-shaped man sneaks past the guard and into the cell. He wears a light gray suit and a red tie. His glasses and bald head swim with the light thrown by the overhead fluorescents. “There’s our boy,” he says, nodding at Jeremy.

  The Tall Man rises to his full height and side by side the men appear like funhouse distortions. They do not shake hands. Nor do they greet each other. Jeremy cannot tell if that is because of a mutual comfort or discomfort.

  “The trial is set. It’s going to be a military tribunal.”

  “Military? This doesn’t have anything to do with the military.”

  “Act of war. That’s what they’re calling it. A week from now. I did everything I could to delay things further, but no dice. Somebody in here has been talking. Reporters are on it. ACLU is crying foul. Unfair imprisonment, prolonged solitary confinement, suspected abusive interrogation tactics, and blah, blah, blah. All that human-rights-violation crap.”

  “The Patriot Act exists for a reason.”

  “You don’t need to defend yourself to me. I’m just telling you that whatever information you’ve pulled from him, you’re going to run into a lot of inadmissible evidence since you’ve never assigned him a lawyer.”

  “This has never been about building a case.”

  Augustus goes silent for a moment and his eyes flit from the Tall Man to Jeremy to the open briefcase on the floor, the instruments within it polished and gleaming. “Well, I hope you’ve had fun, then. But the fun’s over. They’re g
oing to make a martyr out of him.”

  The Tall Man walks to the other side of the cell and stares at the wall as if there is a window there. “I wonder who leaked this to the press.”

  Augustus seems not to hear him. He stations himself in front of the empty chair across from Jeremy and tugs at his pant legs and sits with a huff of difficulty. “As I understand it, he’s going to be indicted tomorrow on eleven counts. They’ll be shipping him off to the supermax in Colorado.”

  The Tall Man continues to stare at the wall, his back to them. After a moment’s pause, he says, “I wonder, too, about a trial timed alongside the election. I wonder about that. I wonder about it very much.”

  “Wonder all you want.” Augustus peers into the open briefcase. His fingers scrabble the air like a spider. He ends up selecting a scalpel and testing its weight in his hand and smiles at Jeremy. “May I?”

  Chapter 41

  CNN IS HER HOMEPAGE. Every time Claire opens her browser, she scans the headlines for news about the Republic, the Resistance. Every now and then an article pops up about a roadside IED ripping through a Humvee or a mortar attack on a combat outpost—and her finger always hesitates above the touch pad before scrolling down, checking the battalion number, blowing out the breath she didn’t know she was holding.

  Today she does not hesitate. Today, hidden away in her library carrel, there is no doubt. She knows the content of the article before she reads it. Under breaking news—in white text on a red banner across the top of the webpage—“Resistance Leader Indicted on 11 Counts.”

  Denver—Jeremy Saber, alleged mastermind behind the 8/3 plane attacks and the Pioneer Square Courthouse bombing, was indicted on eleven counts today, among them conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of a weapon of mass destruction, destruction by explosives, and first-degree murder.

  Since late November of last year, Saber has been detained for questioning in a federal facility in Seattle, Washington. The secrecy of his imprisonment, defended by the Patriot Act, recently came under fire when an anonymous source leaked to the press information reporting alleged torture, including waterboarding, starvation, and months of solitary confinement. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the FBI and ATF for human rights violations, including unfair imprisonment without a trial.

  Saber has since been extradited to Colorado, where he will stand trial before a military tribunal in Fort Collins, a surprising and widely criticized move that will make any appeals and stays impossible if the death penalty is elected. Federal authorities declined to comment except to say that the military has designated the plane attacks and courthouse bombing as acts of war.

  On her way back from the library, she keeps her hood up and her head down, busy with her thoughts. Following the courthouse square bombing, several articles ran about raids and arrests, but for so-called security reasons, the FBI was withholding names and any further details that might compromise its investigation. There were other attacks—a car bomb that ripped through a Christmas parade, a ten-gallon plastic drum of diesel and detergent that detonated at a Methodist church and flamed and clung to everything it splattered—but the courthouse square attack was the most dramatic and resulted in the most casualties, and several cameras captured it from beginning to end and made the rest of the country feel as though they felt firsthand the impact of the van shredding open, the tree igniting.

  At that time, she and Miriam cleared out the cabin and moved to a room above a bar called the Weary Traveler, where they paid their rent in cash by the week. Miriam said she needed to do some digging and abandoned Claire for several days and demanded she remain in the apartment. She watched Christmas specials and stared at the snow falling out the window and listened to the music thumping from the bar below and worried about Patrick.

  When Miriam finally returned, standing in the open door, the snow melting in her hair, she said it was Jeremy. Jeremy had been arrested.

  “Only Jeremy?”

  “Only him.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “Feds received an anonymous tip from a scrambled cell. He was the only one in the safe house when they arrived.”

  “It was Puck,” Claire said. “It had to be.”

  “Puck is dead.” She closed the door behind her and leaned against it.

  Claire asked what she was going to do, and Miriam said there was nothing to do—Jeremy had gotten himself into this mess—and then she locked the door with finality.

  This was the beginning of Miriam’s reluctance to share. Whereas before, Claire had felt like a pupil, Miriam now treated her like a pampered niece. In the months that followed—after they visited several credit unions and banks to withdraw and redeposit money, after they moved into an apartment in the Hawthorne district of Portland, after Miriam secured her admission to William Archer, after they browsed Powell’s Books and shopped at REI and ate barbecued pork kebabs from the Korean carts and hiked Forest Park and stood in the rain at the memorial erected at Pioneer Courthouse Square—whenever Claire would ask questions, Miriam would shrug them off and say, “Don’t worry about it.” Claire would wake sometimes in the middle of the night and catch Miriam staring out the window or scrolling through websites about the courthouse square bombing and know from the stiffness of her spine that the kidnapping had changed something between them.

  These months were a gift, the gift of normalcy, and that gift would expire as soon as they said good-bye at the train station. Then Miriam would begin hunting.

  Little did she know she would become the hunted.

  Claire is not worried about Jeremy. She is worried about Miriam. His indictment—along with the discovery of Reprobus in the old newspaper photos—has simply fed into this almost cyclonic gathering panic Claire feels. The sense that things are coming together and at the same time spinning out of control.

  Enough fucking around. She needs answers.

  Night has fallen. The clouds are low. In the distance she can see the yellow lights of Missoula reflecting off the overcast sky. Reprobus holds his office hours late. She goes to Carver Hall and spots the yellow square of his office and stands below it until it goes dark.

  A minute later, she spots him at the entrance, easing himself down the steps, then walking along the sidewalk with the hunched mosey of an old man with plenty of vigor still in him. Many of the faculty and staff live in Missoula, but Reprobus talks often about his morning stroll to the office, which means he lives in Campustown, the small village of university-owned property available for staff and faculty housing.

  She tries to keep fifty yards between them but panics every time he disappears behind a building or into an island of trees. She takes off her boots and jogs with them in her hands. His footsteps clunk along the pavement, but hers barely whisper. She comes around a corner and finds him stopped in the path ten yards before her. She panics—and then sees a spark of flame, a puff of smoke. He continues walking and she follows, pleasuring in the smell of cherry tobacco from his pipe. Security lamps and streetlights throw puddles of light that she avoids, sticking to the shadows.

  She could simply call out to him. But what would she say? Did you know my father? She needs to be certain. A pixilated image from several decades ago can only tell her so much.

  His house is one of many of the same design, all boxy cardboard-brown split-levels built in the seventies with a small square patch of lawn in back and a smaller square patch in front. She hides behind some hedges across the street and watches the windows of his house brighten with light—and waits another hour for them to go dark—and another hour after that before she tests the back door and finds it unlocked.

  The antique clock ticking on the wall makes her think of a bomb, and she feels like she is racing to defuse it, her hands careful but her heart hurried when she opens and closes the drawers of his desk, rifles through the papers and tries to read them in the dim moonlight streaming in the windows.

  After an hour, she feels beside herself, ready to give up. Since s
he doesn’t know what she is looking for, she forces herself to go through everything. Receipts, tax reports dating back twenty years, instruction manuals—a lawnmower, a microwave, a laptop, a fax machine.

  A laptop. Reprobus was a professed Luddite who refused to exchange email with students, so she hadn’t been surprised to find his office desk topped by an old typewriter. But here was the instruction manual for an HP Pavilion, along with the Costco receipt, dated two years ago. She searches the office again—and then the living room—and finds nothing. It must be either in his university office or upstairs.

  All this time she has kept her backpack on, not wanting to set it down and forget it. The weight of it, combined with the reek of pipe tobacco and mothballs, is bringing on a headache. The stairway is next to the kitchen and she goes to stand at the base of it. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a flickering blue light. The laptop—plugged in and resting on the counter. The phone cord snakes from the wall and into the machine. Dial-up.

  She slowly opens the laptop and the processor whirs and the screen blinks twice and comes to life. He is too trusting or lazy or incompetent to password-protect. She guesses she won’t be as lucky with his email, though. The taskbar carries an icon for Outlook and she clicks on it and it loads and a password request pops up. Her frustration passes a second later as she sees all of the email stacked up in his inbox and the three thousand messages listed in his trash bin. His security settings are minimal. By opting out of the password request, she can’t download any new messages, but she has access to everything archived.