Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  The lycans have carved out their own country, abandoning Volpexx, denying the xenophobic laws that in their collective choke collar felt more constrictive than all the prisons in the world, or so they said.

  Patrick leans against the bar and drinks, hoping the beer will warm the chill from him. The bartender seems to have no neck, his head balanced atop his rounded shoulders. He wears a moth-eaten cable-knit sweater with the sleeves pushed up to reveal his meaty forearms. He collects two empty pint glasses and wipes the counter with a filthy rag.

  Patrick looks beyond the bartender to the mirror behind him. Sometimes he hardly recognizes himself. Head shaved down to skin. Skin as brown as the high desert soil. Body lean, muscles sculpted like carved rock. He looks like a man even when he feels like a kid. He uses the mirror to study the faces around him. A woman with dream-catcher earrings and a high, shrieking laugh. A weak-chinned man in civilian clothes but with the standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. A Mexican with a handlebar mustache and cheeks pitted from acne. He spots a huddle of men standing around a corner booth, laughing, speaking to whoever sits there.

  Patrick asks if that is where he will find the woman named Strawhacker, and the bartender says indeed it is, and Patrick wipes the foam from his lip before taking a closer look.

  The light is so dim that at first he cannot see into the shadowy booth. Then the woman leans forward. Her face is as wrinkled as an old tissue, and her nose filamented with tiny red and purple capillaries. Her gray hair is cut boyishly around her ears. But her eyes are her most striking feature—milky puddles that seem with every blink ready to stream down her cheeks. On the table before her, a whiskey tumbler and a stack of tarot cards.

  She is playing some sort of game with the men who stand around her. One of them pulls five dollars from his wallet and lays it on the table. Then he draws a card from the tarot deck, the middle of the pile, and holds it up for the others to study. Strawhacker goes rigid and licks her lips and finally says, “The Magician.”

  The men gasp out their laughs and shake their heads and curse good-naturedly and Strawhacker steals away the five dollars and bids them good night and they leave her.

  Strawhacker then sips her whiskey and looks at Patrick. They are ten feet apart, and Strawhacker has no eyes, but nonetheless Patrick can feel her dead gaze. His skin tightens into gooseflesh and he takes a step back.

  “Where are you going?” Strawhacker says. “Please. Come here. Stay awhile.”

  Patrick approaches the booth with his beer held like a pistol. The door creaks open as the four men depart the tavern, and he startles at the noise, some of the beer fuzzing over the rim of his glass to chill his wrist. A blast of wind hurries inside and makes the candle flames dance before the door slams shut.

  “How did you know what card that was?”

  “Just luck, just luck,” Strawhacker says and shuffles them with a riffling snap, neatens them into a pile. “Or maybe something more.”

  The booth, too, is built from railroad ties, every inch of wood scarred from knives, people carving out their names and the names of those they love. There is a chair at the end of the booth and Strawhacker indicates that Patrick should sit there and he does.

  “Some people come to me for games and some come to me for reasons more profound. I try to give people what they want.” She sweeps the stack aside. “You’re not here for games.”

  “I’m supposed to believe you can see things?”

  “You’ve come here, haven’t you? Part of you must believe. Yes, part of you must.”

  “I don’t know what to believe.”

  “It’s hard to know what to believe anymore. These are strange times. What I’ve discovered about myself is this: there’s a muscle in my brain that stretches open, like an iris maybe, yes, some diaphragm of muscle, and images soar through. It has no discernible real logic—but that’s my best explanation—it’s a spot to start from.”

  “You talk like a crazy teacher.”

  “You talk like an insolent boy.” She lifts her face in defiance, her chin protruding farther than her nose. Her voice is lower when she speaks again. “You want to know if I can see? I can see. I can see you colliding with another boy in center field after chasing a pop fly, can see the bone swell that made you limp for three weeks after. I can see you fingering a girl behind your middle school and then not washing your hand for a whole day to preserve that mysterious, intoxicating smell. I can see you shooting your first deer and putting your thumb into the kill wound and tasting the blood. I can see your father running out into a lightning storm to grab your teddy bear forgotten in the yard while you watched from the window. And I can see him now, a dead man in a faraway cave with bats roosting over his bones.” Flecks of spit fly from her mouth. “And if you want more from me than that, you’re going to have to pay up, like every other asshole.”

  “God.”

  “He won’t be able to save you. Not where you’re going.” Then her expression softens and her head tilts, as if she hears something. “What’s that book you’ve got in your pocket?”

  Patrick can feel the weight of it now at his breast, his notebook, the one salvaged from the Republic. His father’s. He keeps it always in his breast pocket, over his heart, to touch now and then. It seems to pulse, as if made of nerves and muscle. He has always turned to his father to know what to do. Now the book tells him what to do.

  “There’s something in that book, but I don’t understand.” Strawhacker holds out her hand, the fingers long and bony, the nails rimmed with dirt. “What’s in that book?”

  “Shut up about the book. I came to ask you about two people.”

  “Tell me what’s in that book and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  Patrick pulls out a wadded-up five-dollar bill and lays it on the table and it vanishes into Strawhacker’s hand. “These two people. You want to know if they’re alive or dead. One of them is, one of them isn’t. That’s all I know.”

  “Some fortune.”

  “You’re planning something. You are. You’re going to do something incredibly stupid, aren’t you?” She reaches out a hand for Patrick. “What is it you think is waiting for you out there? Beyond the fence? Tell me. Please.”

  Her hand scrabbles closer and Patrick slams his fist down on it as if it were a spider.

  Strawhacker cries out and the tavern goes silent and so many faces swing toward them and the bartender yells, “Hey!” Before anybody can ask a question, Patrick stands and snatches his poncho and shoves his way out the door and allows in the wind that extinguishes all the candles in one rushing breath.

  The storm is stronger now. The rain lashes at him, pattering his poncho and needling his skin. He looks over his shoulder often, seeing if anyone follows, half expecting to see the long silhouette of the blind woman loping after him, the silken orbs of her eyes hatched, spiders spilling from the sockets.

  He reaches for the book twice, reassured by the weight and pressure of it, as if it might have been snatched away after all. He has learned much from it. First that his father was experimenting with more than a neuroblocker for Volpexx. There are slips of paper printed from websites full of passages about neurodegenerative conditions associated with prions—everything from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to fatal insomnia to lobos—and how they are spread: the consumption of meat, the administration of human growth hormone, and sexual intercourse. There is no cure for prion infection and the pathogen is difficult to destroy, resilient to heat and enzymes.

  And there are pages crammed with his small, square handwriting about stock cultures and select agent organisms and the CDC and sodium hypochlorite and on and on, like a language Patrick didn’t speak.

  And then there was the very last page, ripped almost entirely, only a frayed sleeve of it remaining, on which is written half his Gmail address. His father, he knew, was paranoid. He wouldn’t correspond with Patrick through his military account because he thought someone would read their emails. And he constantly cha
nged the passwords on his credit cards, frequent-flier programs, and other accounts because he was certain someone would hack him.

  At first Patrick thought nothing of the email address, but something drew him back to it. Then one day, after peeling off his rain-soaked clothes, he noticed that his socks left the red imprint of their stitching on his clam-white foot. He stared at it for a long time before retrieving a pencil and opening the notebook to its second-to-last page and rubbing the graphite softly across it. There were the words already printed there, and then there were other words scarred over the top of them, the residue of what his father had scribbled on the other page. Patrick at first thought this hopeless, the graffiti twist of letters, but then he made out a stack of words with Xs through them: beer, yeast, California. Passwords. His father couldn’t remember his passwords, so he wrote them down. The final word in the column, the only one not crossed out, was his name, Patrick. Patrick was the password.

  He had tried to email Neal Desai after he returned stateside, without success, the doctor missing, presumed dead. And he had tried to get the military and Google to hand over his father’s email accounts—but they wouldn’t until he was confirmed dead and Patrick named his inheritor.

  Now he had the password—and it told him what he needed to know. It told him what he needed to do.

  He turns again to check the road behind him and this time sees headlights cutting through the rain and steps off the road so that he won’t be struck. The vehicle—a van, he can now tell, one of the vans the nurses and EMTs have been using for medevac—slows as it nears him, and he throws out an arm, sticks up a thumb.

  Lightning flashes and colors the world a pale blue. With the afterimage in his eyes and the rain pelting his face, he can hardly see a thing when he yanks open the door. He hears a woman’s voice yell, “Get in already,” and then, when he shakes off his poncho and pulls back the hood, “Oh.”

  It takes him a minute. The darkness. The baggy uniform. The rain-swept confusion of the night. And then he notices her red hair, the color of a poisoned apple, chin length and tucked behind her ear. And she smiles, and he knows her, Malerie.

  “You,” he says. He is halfway into the cab already, his foot on the railing, his hand on the dash, and he pulls back now and steps into the rain. “Second thought, I’d rather walk.”

  Maybe it is the way she chases after him, maybe it is the way she fiercely apologizes and calls herself stupid, the stupidest person in the world, maybe it is the torrential downpour or the grumbling thunder or his general loneliness or the sick-scared feeling that has followed him from the bar, but he finally says all right, all right, and lets her give him a ride back to the base and an hour later he has her propped up on a bathroom sink and is fucking her while staring at his reflection hard in the mirror.

  Chapter 53

  CLAIRE HAS SWEAT through her clothes digging his grave. Now she sits cross-legged against an oak and stares at the hump of dirt with the shovel stabbed into it. The shade offers no relief from the heat. Neither does the canteen of water she gulps, splashes her face with. A cloud of humidity hangs over everything, like the breath of the reactor. A bluebottle fly buzzes languidly through the air and orbits her head before settling on her wrist to drink from the sweat beading there. She watches it a moment, then crushes it with her palm, a smear of blood and black twitching legs.

  She could have buried Matthew anywhere—a park, a backyard—but she chose a graveyard. With all the disorder in the world—helicopters stuttering overhead, cars rusting in the streets, neighborhoods burning, birds falling dead from the sky—she liked the order of the place and the act. Burying him here, among his fellow dead and the tidy granite headstones, felt good, felt right.

  She found a place on a hill, an empty spread of grass, and stomped the blade of her shovel into it. She took her time—pressing down with her foot, leaning into the handle, sinking the blade into the soil with a slow scuff. Sweat trailed down her forehead and stung her eyes and blurred her vision of the hole growing larger and larger beneath her. The loamy, overturned earth mixed up with the smell of his pungent body. Her hands first blistered, then wept, then bled. After three hours, she had gone three feet. She tried not to look at his body when she dragged it to the edge of the hole, rolled it in with a thud. But she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that he landed facedown, his arm bent at an unnatural angle behind his back. She couldn’t let him lie like that for the rest of eternity. She dropped into the hole and, with some difficulty, flopped him over, folded his arms over his chest, where his heart was hidden. The day was hot, but he was as cool as the exposed dirt, and she fought the temptation to shove a gun in her mouth and lie down beside him. She looked at him then—saw his skin graying and swelling around the edges, saw half his face missing as if someone had taken a bite out of it—and the urge passed and she only wanted to cover him up, to forget.

  Sometimes Chinook choppers buzz the sky like hornets. Sometimes they drop cartons of Volpexx and sometimes they drop bombs. Sometimes soldiers spill out of Humvees and staple posters to telephone poles and storefronts and garage doors, posters about amnesty and contamination, about what will happen to those who choose to remain behind: imprisonment, a slow death from radiation, a swift death from execution should they engage with any military personnel.

  She doesn’t need a poster to tell her this. The reminders are everywhere. Bodies sit on park benches. Bodies are buckled into cars. Bodies are curled up on sidewalks. Some of them with blackened skin the wind dusts away, their carcasses nothing more than dried-out husks encasing a bundle of bones. Some of them, more freshly dead, gunshot or clawed up or bright with sores and missing clumps of hair and stinking so badly that she rarely goes a day without retching between her feet.

  It is because of Matthew that she is alive and it is because of her that Matthew is dead. Five months ago, when the sky lit up, he drove them directly to the Seattle REI and hurled a rock through the window and ignored the alarm blaring while he shrugged on a backcountry pack and she did the same to fill with iodine tabs and Clif Bars and knives and matches and tents and sleeping bags and aluminum blankets and rain gear. They even got a bicycle rack and two Treks, and when she yelled, “Why?” over the alarm, he said, “For when there’s no more gas.” He understood it all so clearly, as if their story were a novel and he simply flipped to the end to see what would happen.

  They should have left—with the millions of others who sought escape from a ruined world and treatment for their ruined bodies—but they hesitated. Within a day, the gas stations dried up, the freeways gridlocked, clogged with cars, many of them abandoned. The whole world deafened by sirens and horns, gunfire. Soon it was too late: she could not make it through the checkpoints the military established. Matthew could have left but he did not.

  Now she is alone. Now he is dead. Now he is buried beneath a mound of black dirt with a shovel stuck in it. She does not cry. Though sweating feels like a kind of crying, her clothes soaked through, her hair plastered to her forehead in damp whorls. When her hair started to grow out blond again, he touched its roots and said, “Why did you hide that from me?” He called it the color of beaten gold, and she called him an English major. When it was long enough, he helped her scissor away the dyed sections of her hair so that she looked like one person, not two.

  It happened yesterday. Here in Monmouth. They came from the coast, where Matthew had the idea to steal a boat and sail it north to British Columbia. The beaches were strewn with the reeking carcasses of crab, halibut, sharks, whales thickly netted with flies, poisoned from the Columbia’s outflow, and she could see the cutters and battleships floating several miles out that would intercept them.

  On the road they met another couple—Ella and Sam, who were like them; there were many like them, lycans who didn’t want any trouble, who only wanted to be left alone—and they spent the past week together, sleeping in an abandoned house, a brick ranch, nothing conspicuous. They drank gin and talked books and po
litics and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. One morning, while Claire slept off a hangover, Matthew and the others were sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee and reading old magazines, when a chopper passed overhead.

  Choppers were always passing overhead and they ignored it. But it didn’t ignore them. It spotted the three of them—then lit them up with a chain gun. Target practice. She woke to the rattle of gunfire and then the rotor wash banging closed the front door.

  She blames herself for not being beside him. She blames Matthew for being so careless and arrogant. She blames the soldier who manned the chain gun, blames the pilot who hovered the Blackhawk over the house, blames the brass for sending squads into an irrecoverable wasteland, blames the entire U.S. war machine for fencing lycans in, here and abroad, and expecting them to tuck tail. But most of all she blames the Resistance. She blames Balor. Because of him everyone believed that lycans are feral, are capable only of raw animality. Because of him her world has become one big grave.

  She pops a few iodine pills and glugs them down with a long pull from her canteen. She knows the iodine can only do so much to defend her, to fight the radiation. She knows that, given enough time to work its way through her system, the radiation will bloom into yellow tumors.

  There are other unmarked, freshly dug graves here in this cemetery. And there are unburied bodies, too, maybe the remains of those who dragged themselves here to expire. Again she considers joining them, opening up her head with a bullet. This isn’t a new impulse. She thinks often about suicide. A rope around her neck knotted to a garage beam. A dive from the top of a building. A long swim into the ocean. After a momentary discomfort, there would be no more hunger, no more fear, no more running and running and running.