Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  The past week, she has joined them every night in the gym. The three men, all teaching assistants for Reprobus. The Pack, he calls them. They wore clothes at first, unsure how she would feel, but after two nights she said, “Can I trust you?” and Matthew said, “If we don’t have trust, we’re no different than the pure breeds.” She was fairly certain this was a line stolen from Reprobus—who was always muttering platitudes and prophecies that felt somehow half-baked and devastatingly true—but if so, it was a good line and one worth repeating, because that was one of the things most lacking in her life, trust.

  She stripped naked and they did the same. A guttural rumbling filling their throats. She knew, if she was going to be all college textbooky, that modesty was a by-product of human intelligence, irrelevant when the animal took over. Transformation was all about tapping into impulse, forgetting about what was outside you. She knew this. She did. But she still felt, with her clothes in a pile at her feet, as if she might throw up.

  The hours spun away on the wall clock as she ripped at the heavy bags, leapt over sawhorses, swung from ropes, eventually stumbling away from the gym feeling languid and frayed and emptied, as if she had just screamed her way through the greatest orgasm in world history. She has forgotten the goodness of letting go, unleashing herself. How the adrenaline rushing through her feels like the hit of some delicious drug. How coordinated every sensation becomes. She remembers reading, in an anatomy and physiology course, about how the senses operate at different speeds—the mind processes light more slowly than sound—and then tastes and smells, slower still. That does not feel true any longer, every signal seeming to spark her brain at once.

  Does she think of Patrick? She does. But not so much, not anymore. He is part of another world, and this is her world. Matthew is right now, right here. When she thinks of Patrick, she wonders whether she was simply starved and knows that the starved, with no standards of taste, will hunger for anything—dirt, a browned banana, a half-eaten sandwich pilfered from a garbage can.

  Waking up is difficult. So is completing her homework. Her joints feel full of ground bits of glass. Her toothbrush comes away from her mouth bloody, so she sticks to mouthwash. She tells Andrea she has met a boy. Every morning, a few minutes before class, she rolls out of bed and pancakes her face with makeup to hide the bruises, then rushes off.

  For this reason she misses the news about the Howling Bill.

  It isn’t until she walks through the light snow that has fallen overnight and makes the campus sparkle like white fire—it isn’t until after she kicks off her boots and enters the auditorium—it isn’t until after she looks for Matthew and spots him conferring at the front of the room with Reprobus—that she notices the upset buzz of conversation around her. It isn’t until she takes her seat and unzips her bag and observes Reprobus climb to the stage and cross his hands over his belly and address them in a solemn voice that she realizes something terrible has happened.

  “We are at an interesting juncture,” he says and waits for silence to settle over the room. “History is being made. History that will one day be taught in this very course, assuming this university continues to exist, which I very much hope for but very much doubt all the same. Yesterday, Congress rushed the bill, an amendment to the Patriot Act, using a procedural trick normally reserved for noncontroversial laws. They made significant changes from an earlier version, never making the new draft available for public review prior to the vote. Only two representatives voted against it. The bill now goes forward to the Senate, where it is expected to pass.”

  The snow in her hair melts and drips to her shoulders and lap. She takes out her pen but there is nothing to write, so she holds it like a knife.

  Reprobus says this comes in the wake of last week’s raid on a Florida terrorist cell, an entire apartment complex full of lycans busted—dozens arrested and a large cache of weapons discovered. With the security level at red for two years now, with new threats discovered every week, the government has decided new steps must be taken to keep the country safe.

  She writes down safe in her notebook and then scratches it out.

  He explains what this means. With the new year, all IDs will note lycan status. The lycan no-fly will remain in effect indefinitely. A database, accessible to anyone online, will list every registered lycan, along with their addresses and photos. Antidiscrimination laws will be lifted: it will be legal for a business to deny service and employment to a lycan, because the government has determined that, in light of recent and repeated attacks, lobos is now a level-one public health and safety threat.

  This is the gateway, Reprobus says, to impoverishment, to ridicule, to attacks. The gateway to vaccinations proposed by the idiot cowboy running for president.

  “I refuse to bear it. That might mean a fine or that might mean imprisonment. That might mean my job. I don’t know. I don’t care. When I was your age, I made a lot of noise. I have noticed your generation doesn’t make much noise. I find you disgustingly polite. I would encourage you to take to the streets. I would encourage you to be rude and obnoxious. Make yourself heard. Howl.”

  And then he excused them.

  Chapter 46

  HARD BITS OF ICE fall from the sky and bite his skin and patter his cammies. His radio is broken, shattered by shrapnel or a bullet, but his GPS still works. Patrick panics when he realizes it is switched on, a button accidentally pressed, the battery half-drained. He has the coordinates for the base saved and keys them in and sees he has more than forty miles to travel. To save power he will have to check his placement every few hours and hope that he can eyeball his bearings and not wander too far off course.

  An hour ago, when he opened the door to leave, she grabbed him, her fingers bony but strong, pressing painfully into the meat of his arm. She handed him the pistol that she had kept hidden from him. He thanked her and holstered it, but she did not let him go. He could sense, in her trembling face, that she wanted to tell him something. He waited—expecting her to warn him or wish him well—but the words never came. She let him go and gave him a push and closed the door. He stood there and faced the empty country ahead of him and felt the deepening cold, like the breath of a cave where there is no cave, already creeping under his clothes.

  He grew up in the country and at night often sat on the porch with a Coke watching for shooting stars. He knows darkness unadulterated by the glow of a city. But out here, on a night lit by a half-moon, with thick clouds smearing away most of the stars, he feels gone. So gone that when he hears a chopper—the rotor like a flopping saw blade—and guesses it is twenty or more miles away, he doesn’t bother trying to spot it, to spark a flare and wave his arms. There will be no more help for him out here, no more miracles: he used up all his good luck on the old woman.

  He trudges through the snow, every step a loud crunch, like a big dog toothing its way through a brittle bone. He would worry about the noise if everything didn’t seem so empty. He looks behind him and sees the trenches his footsteps have gouged through the snow and knows that if somebody or something comes looking for him, they won’t have much trouble finding him.

  He can feel his heartbeat in his shoulder. He tries to concentrate on something else. A cluster of stars. A knob of ice. The piney woods that spill from the hills he must cross, east of here, where for a long time dawn has been coming. A faint green glow creeping across the sky. He is on a rise when the sun finally breaks with a white flash. He goes momentarily blind and loses his footing and goes sailing down a hillside with a wave of snow coming with him, going fast, nudging against a few rocks but otherwise feeling weightless as he’s buoyed along, leaving his stomach behind him on the ledge.

  His shoulder feels bitten and he worries that the scab has broken. He flexes his fingers and toes, making sure he’s otherwise uninjured, and then kicks his way out of the cold, thick blanket that surrounds him, nearly whooping with excitement and relief.

  His cries are cut short by the tracks he spots all around h
im. Boots. Fresh, the details of the tread not yet erased by blowing snow. He crouches to study their imprint. It matches his own. The tracks, at first separate and then twining together, head into a pine forest a hundred yards away.

  He wants to sprint through the snow, follow their passage, call out for help, but something roots him in place for a long minute. He does not understand what a group of soldiers—maybe six of them, as best as he can tell—would be doing out here, far from any road, far from anything. Maybe special ops, maybe choppered or parachuted in, maybe to destroy some terrorist camp. Or maybe something else.

  Just then the woods erupt with a high, plaintive yowling. They, the wolves, sound excited. Something has excited them.

  He is barely aware of drawing his pistol, barely aware of lifting his feet and letting them fall, hurrying across the last snowy expanse and pushing into the cover of the woods, trying not to trip over the roots and fallen branches that knot the ground.

  It is easy to find them because of the noise they make—at first howling and then yapping and clacking their teeth and disturbing the underbrush—so much noise that they do not notice him when he stands near. But it is not easy to make sense of them—to make sense of what he sees—a clearing full of men, dressed in cammies, dancing around a moose that struggles weakly to rise. The snow is stamped down and dappled with bright pools of blood.

  Its antlers are a thorny basket, and the moose rakes them one way, then another, when the soldiers dart toward it and stab its haunches and its belly with spears—yes, spears—ten feet long and whittled into points. The moose’s legs don’t seem to be working, one of them bent at a sharp angle. Its eyes roll back in fear and it releases a deep-throated moan that is cut short by a spear piercing its neck.

  The men throw back their heads and bay raggedly and before Patrick can stop himself he lifts his pistol and fires it into the pink, brightening sky. There is a cracking boom. The sun flames at the top of the trees.

  Some of the men swing around and some flatten to the ground and some dart into the trees. A holy silence settles over the forest. Patrick lets his arm slowly fall until the pistol aims at the ground.

  Then one of the soldiers separates himself from the others and starts toward Patrick. At first he appears misshapen—hunchbacked, two-headed—the kind of monster that pursues a child in a fairy-tale forest. Its crunching footsteps are so loud, like teeth chewing ice.

  Patrick feels a pressure around his heart. He recognizes that this is not one man, but two, the second upon the other’s back, riding there like an infant in a leather harness. Legless. Deformed or war wounded.

  The man who serves as a carrier stands at an angle, so that both can observe Patrick. They each wear cammies—torn and muddied and patched and ice-caked, as if stripped from a scarecrow—and they each wear beards that cannot hide the blunt snout of a lycan, their eyes rimmed with blood the color of the dawn. They may as well be the same man for their appearance.

  Then the one in the harness begins to speak. What first sounds like a growl mellows into a string of recognizable words. “Patrick,” the lycan says, “Patrick? Is that you, Patrick? Is that really you?”

  It is hard to see, with the sun half-risen and the forest soaked in shadow, and it is hard to believe, with so much time and so many miles between them, but Patrick gradually comes to understand that he is looking at his father.

  * * *

  Chase is always so tired. During the day, he can more or less deal with the pepper-belly stress, chewing down another tablet, calling Buffalo for advice on what to wear or say, studying a speech until he has more or less committed it to memory, choosing to relish or ignore the possibility he will very shortly be elected president. But at night, once sleep overtakes him, he cannot contain any of his anxieties, and so they pound through him like black bulls escaping a ranch without fences. So he doesn’t sleep, not as often as he should.

  He used to sleep like a baby, like a rock, like the dead—that’s what he always told people. He would nap every afternoon and wake up with a half smile and pulse-slamming erection, ready for whatever needed conquering. No longer.

  And the lack of sleep is beginning to catch up with him, so that, like a drunk, he can only patch together memories, a few shards gone missing from every moment. Sometimes he will be telling a joke or a story—the one about the priest and the sheep, the one about the time he punched a grizzly sniffing around his tent when camping the backcountry at Glacier—and his audience will smile but he can tell from their shifty apologetic gazes that he is repeating himself.

  That’s how he feels now, at the Tuonela Mine, where the air smells like sulfur and the lung-blackening exhaust of a tractor-trailer. He feels like he has been here before. He feels like he must have worn the same clothes yesterday. He feels like he keeps saying, “Great, great,” but can’t stop himself from repeating it no matter what anyone tells him.

  The tour guide, Mason, is a squat-bodied American with the black wiry hair of a nostril who speaks with expansive hand gestures and who wears a gray shirt wrinkled like foil along his broad back.

  Mason leads them first through the business center, a hive of narrow hallways and square concrete offices without doors in which sallow-faced black-tied men hammer keyboards and square stacks of paper and drink from disposable cups of tea. He walks backward when he can, occasionally jarring a shoulder into a doorframe, while talking to them about uranium mining and refinement, telling them how the ore is generally low concentration so that the extraction has to be high volume. He tells them, with his fist smacking his open palm, that 20 percent of the world’s uranium presently comes from the Lupine Republic. “Twenty percent,” he says. “Ten thousand tons. Quite a bit of which was drawn from the ground beneath your feet. That’s a whole lot.”

  He talks about how the ore is processed by milling it into particles and he talks about how it is then treated by chemical leaching to extract the uranium and he talks about how the yellowcake is the result of this, a dry powder sold on the market as U3O8. “And that’s what you see blasting out of here on train after train after train.”

  Chase knows most of this—he’s been briefed extensively on the mines and forced to memorize all the talking points that make nuclear energy the key to powering the States through the next century—and he pays more attention to whether he is slouching, whether his gut is sucked in, as the reporters snap so many photos of him that he sees the bright burst of a flash even when his eyes are shut.

  The tiled hallway is wet and Mason tells them to be careful and they skate around a corner, where they surprise a black-haired janitor with a tumor like a cauliflower growing out of his neck. He wears gray coveralls and he hunches over his mop and he says, “Oh!” when he sees them and retreats against the wall and says how terribly sorry he is, his eyes flitting between Mason and Chase, how terribly sorry.

  They step outside, into sunlight so bright it makes them shield their eyes, onto an observation deck with the snow recently scraped from it, to take in the view of the open pit mines, one of them half-full of yellow ice, and the other, carved out layer by layer, the walls sloping gradually inward, so that it appears a pyramid was drawn upside down from it. Dynamite claps like thunder. Loaders and diggers rattle and beep, their drivers in iron-sleeve suits and enclosed cabins with the very best filtration systems, which protect them—“Mostly,” Mason says—from radiation and airborne dust.

  Inside, they stomp the cold out of their feet and put on safety goggles and yellow plastic helmets before heading into the refinement facility, where they clamp along ironwork planks and up and down stairwells and pass by milling machinery stained with rivers of orange rust wherever there is a scratch or a rivet or a screw. Geiger counters and radon detectors seem to hang from every wall like a clock collection clicking its way to doomsday.

  They take a juddering elevator with graffiti notched on its walls and gum stuck to its floor to some dim lower level full of access shafts from which cool, musty air gusts like
the breath of a buried beast. There are grated fans everywhere, sucking out the radon-poisoned air and blasting in filtered air from outside, and Mason has to yell over the top of them to be heard. He tells them about sunken shafts and ore veins and crosscuts. He talks about tunnels known as raises and as winzes meant for extraction.

  A miner with a headlamp walks past their group and smiles, his teeth flecked black, and says something to Chase in Russian. He holds out his hand and Chase takes it and pumps it even as the security force closes in around them. He knows that everyone who works for the mine must succumb to a monthly blood test, that any who do not test positive for Volpexx are immediately terminated. “Don’t worry,” Chase tells them and adjusts his body to face a flashing camera. “You worry too much.”

  When they climb into the elevator again, Mason leans in to Chase and snickers and says, “Hey, is it true you once threw a ball of hamburger at a vegan protester after touring a meatpacking plant?”

  “That’s not true. She was a vegetarian.”