He had been working out of the old lab for the past few months, while construction continued on the five-million-dollar Pfizer-funded extension. It was a massive round-roofed building that looked like a whaleback rolling out of the earth. Last he heard, they were to begin moving their equipment next week, the exterior finished, the interior electrical, tile work, and painting still under way. One of its features: a safe room in the basement with coded locks, refrigeration units, a separate well, filtered air, and generators with enough fuel to last six months.
He hurried the two hundred yards, first with his duffel and computer, a stitch in his side so severe he felt as if a knife had run through his ribs. He keyed open the building and tromped down the stairs and rounded the corner to where the door was waiting for him, as unassuming as a closet except for the steel-tooth keypad. He punched in the code, his birthday, and it swung open with the cold breath of a crypt.
He dumped everything he carried and then ran back upstairs and exited the building and staggered more than ran to his lab, where he unlocked a storage cabinet and grabbed as many vaccine vials as he could fit in his pockets. He nearly took them from the fridge and then decided he couldn’t trust the power, so chose the vials full of lyophilized powder that were sterile and must be reconstituted with diluent before injection. They were stable enough to survive harsh conditions.
He hurried his way outside again. When he plodded along the pathways that snaked between the buildings, the vials clinked and jingled. He realized he was sweating heavily, despite the night’s chill. He could not seem to get enough air—and his chest ached in time with his pulse. He leaned against a building as long as he dared.
He wanted to lie down in the grass and rest. It looked so soft and he was so tired. But he couldn’t. The cranberry glow of the sky reminded him of that.
On trembling legs, he started forward, not jogging, walking, knowing he would collapse if he wasn’t careful. A cold wind blew and the bare-branched trees shook like things half-alive. He was twenty yards away from the Pfizer Lab when he heard the roar of engines, saw headlights smear across the glass-doored entry. He tried to turn and as he did so his knee popped, buckled. He fell into a heap.
He felt a sharpness and heard a sharp chiming at his side. He had crushed some of the vials. He lay there a moment, willing himself to move, gulping air down a throat that felt blistered, as if he had been sucking on a hair dryer. There was something wrong with his knee. It felt loose, unbound. And when he tried to move it, he felt a sting, as if a wasp had burrowed into the joint. He struggled into a seated position and then managed to stand upright. His knee nearly gave way, but he had no choice except to put the pain far from his mind. He dragged himself forward—a few feet at a time—lurching and resting, lurching and resting.
He heard glass exploding. He heard wood splintering, metal banging, plastic shattering—and he could picture clearly the desks overturned and file cabinets knocked over and computers hurled against walls, their wiry guts spilling everywhere. Then he heard footsteps padding along the concrete pathway.
He groped for the revolver at his waist. It was slick with sweat and lost in the fat of his belly. By the time he retrieved it, the lycan was almost upon him. A woman. Her hair dreadlocked. A hemp necklace the only thing she wore. He did not get a closer look than this because she did not pause in her approach, a blur of hair and muscle. He fired. The bullet shouted. She squealed and fell and curled up on herself.
Once the gunshot faded, howling replaced it. They would close in on him soon.
Somehow he managed to shoulder his way into the building—to thud down the stairs—to drag the steel door closed behind him—before they found him. But find him they did. He put his hands over his ears when they threw their bodies against the door, again and again, a thundering that seemed like it would never stop. Until it did.
That was five months ago. Sometimes he doesn’t know whether he is waking or dreaming. Sometimes he talks to himself. Sometimes he shits and pisses freely on the floor. Once he woke and thought a lycan crouched over him, its face only inches away, its mouth open to reveal the serrated edge of its teeth. Neal issued an animal cry and scampered to the far corner of the room and huddled there in a ball. “Stay away from me,” he said. “You stay away from me!” But of course he was alone.
Still, he can’t help but keep his revolver close, tucked into the back of his pants, so that the skin there is thick with callus. The generators are still humming, but the lightbulbs burned out a week ago and now he spends his days alone in the dark, the pace of his breathing the only conversation.
Only one of the vials survived; the rest shattered in his escape. It sits on the counter, along with his laptop, his papers. Waiting.
There is a sink in the corner. This is Neal’s toilet, washbasin, and drinking source. He tries to fill up his belly on the water from the tap. His hands shake when he fumbles for his glass, a beaker. He fills it and brings it blindly to his mouth and starts with a thin swallow. But that is not enough. He swings it back. The water sloshes and bubbles. His neck convulses when he swallows. He drinks and drinks until he chokes and coughs and vomits and then drinks some more.
Many years ago, he went on a no-carb diet and lost fifty pounds in a month. His skin sagged off him as if he were melting. “I don’t recognize you,” people said. That was because he was no longer himself. He was meant to be heavy. And now he is moving further and further away from what he is meant to be, the fat gone from his body, his bones pressing through his loose skin. He is now at the point where he has nothing left to lose.
He remembers, what feels at once like ten minutes ago and ten years ago, watching a show on the Discovery Channel. It was about identity. At one point in the episode, a scientist posed a question about what made you feel like you. Suppose, say, he was to steadily replace every cell in your body with a cell from Ronald Reagan. When would you cease to be yourself? Could a single cell, somewhere in the middle of the transfer, make all the difference? What if you retained your body but your brain was transplanted? What if you descended into a coma or succumbed to dementia—when do you cease to be? What is the line that distinguishes you from not-you? With his daughter, he could point to the precise moment when everything changed, when she was and was no longer his little girl. As for himself? There is a stainless-steel paper-towel dispenser above the sink. Before the lightbulbs burned out, he would study his ghostly reflection in it. Toward the end, he did not recognize himself—bony and sallow skinned as he is—but he wonders if the stranger he sees might have come to life some time ago, long before the day the world exploded.
He opened the door once. The hallway was pitch-black and he coughed at the smell of smoke and when he thought he heard something shuffle and scrape toward him, he slammed the entry shut and pressed his back against it.
What chance did he have out there? How could Neal keep himself alive, keep the vial safe? His knee was ruined—he could barely drag himself across the room. His only choice is to wait. Someone will come. Someone has to come.
If someone doesn’t, he will die. He is dying. His body is eating itself. And if he dies, everything will have been a waste. His years in the lab. His daughter’s suffering. All this time entombed beneath the ground, this room like a black hole awaiting its dead. He cannot let that be true. He must live. For him to live, he must eat.
Sometimes he thinks he hears things outside the door. Whispers. Claws gently teased across the steel. But now, when he presses his ear against it, he can only hear his own stomach—gurgling, whining. Hunger is his only voice. He doubles over until the cramping passes and then he reaches for the doorknob and clamps his hand around it and says to the darkness, to the vial, “I’ll be right back. You’ll see. I’ll go and I’ll get us something to eat.”
Chapter 58
CHASE WILLIAMS tells the women to take off their clothes. There are two of them, an Asian and a blonde, both as slender waisted as wasps, and they do as they are told. The Asian wears
a long red sweater with a black leather belt and knee-high boots to match. When she bends down to unzip the boots, she turns around so that her ass peeks out, the purple thong dividing it. The blonde wears a black thigh-length dress that falls around her ankles in an inky pile. She kicks it aside, along with her heels.
He tells them to touch each other. He tells them to give him a show. No music plays, but they move as though they hear something, tossing their hair and jutting their hips, as their hands roam along a thigh, a breast, the long scoop of a stomach. They snap the bands of their panties. They gaze hungrily at him through the veil of their mascara-clotted lashes.
On the walls of his suite hang two portraits—Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt—squared by gold-leaf frames. The décor changes with every president. He requested these two men specifically—the two men he often referenced on the campaign trail, not Lincoln, not Reagan, not all the old standbys. They seem to stare dispassionately at the women along with him. They were, Chase has always said, the right kind of assholes. Everyone calls this place the People’s House, instead of the White House, and he likes that, likes the way the term looks past the sculptures and polished woodwork and museum-quality hush and acknowledges instead ordinariness, the possibility of weakness, dirty little secrets.
Though he does not tell the women to do so, they slowly gravitate toward the bed, knowing that this is where he will want them. They cannot simply fall back on it—they have to climb up. The bed is massive—a king-size that rises three feet off the ground—with wooden corner posts that twist upward into snakes. When the stylist asked if he would prefer a queen instead, he gave her a deadening glare and said, no, only a king would do.
He does not join them there. He sits in a wingback chair in the corner with his legs crossed. He wears one of the many navy blue suits that appear in his closet as if by magic, all perfectly tailored. A round wooden table beside him carries a brass lamp and a stack of paper-clipped documents from the briefing he attended that morning. He will never read them. The more he reads, the more he feels he doesn’t know.
The women begin to keen and writhe. They unlatch their bras and their breasts tumble out. Their mouths open and their tongues dart out to taste each other. They keep staring at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He snaps off the lamp beside him so that he falls into shadow. He wants to look—he doesn’t want them to look at him.
He heard somewhere that presidents age faster, that they go gray and wrinkle suddenly in office. That certainly seems the case. His hair is thinning away from his forehead. His skin is the spotted brown color of a dead leaf. His muscles are soft, his belly bloated. When he gets out of the shower, he doesn’t towel the steam from the mirror. His reflection disgusts him. He no longer has the energy to exercise—he only wants to eat, to sleep. It is strange to think how young he was once, a baby at his mother’s breast, a teenager with a football spiraling from his fingertips, a twenty-something with a throbbing hard-on, and that this person remains curled up inside him somewhere like a worm.
There was a time when the sight of two women rolling around in bed would have sent him into a state close to seizure. That time has passed. He feels curious, of course, but not awakened. He tries to will all the blood in his body to his groin, to pump himself into a state of arousal. Maybe today will be different. Maybe today will be a good day. Because he has two women who will do whatever he asks them. And because so far nothing bad has happened. The absence of a negative. That is a good day. How pathetic he has become. He tries his hand now, tries undoing his belt, massaging what feels like a dead slug. Nothing.
The portraits on the wall now seem to stare at him, their expressions souring, forbidding. He has let them down. One of the women—the blonde—says, “When are you going to come over here and fuck us?” She lies on her back with her legs spread and her hands cupped between them.
“It’s been a long day,” he says.
“What?” she says.
“You can go. You can both go. I’m tired.”
The women sit up, their lipstick smeared, their hair tousled, and then the Asian slides off the bed and slinks toward him. “We want to stay. We want to make you feel good.” She reaches out a hand.
He would retreat from her, but there is nowhere to go. “Get out,” he says and zips himself up and swipes at the air and covers his face with a trembling hand. “Leave me!”
Once he heard a story from a man who worked in a bullet factory. He guessed that over the past ten years he had plated millions of hollow-points. Brass strips punched into primers. One hundred and eighty-five grains. Nickel-plated, copper-plated. All day long he stood at the press and every evening he watched the news and saw how some cop in Arkansas got shot in a routine traffic stop, some sister in New Jersey got a round through the eye when her brother was fooling around with a handgun swiped from a nightstand. He pulls a lever in a factory in Billings and two months and three thousand miles away somebody loses their life. One thing leads to another.
There are so many examples of this. You take a left instead of a right turn and miss a head-on collision that would have left you brain damaged for life. You tease a friend about his shaky hand and it shames him into going to a doctor who discovers a brain tumor just before it metastasizes. You decide to drop by the grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine and reach for a bottle of Shiraz at the same time as a woman with a switchblade smile who will bear you two children before running off with a bartender named Sasa. Think too hard about it and you never want to leave your house. The way one decision can domino through the rest of your life.
A plane packed with C-4 comes spiraling out of the sky. And then?
The Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power generated at the Hanford nuclear site and thirty-one federal dams, goes offline. Its service territory covers all of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and western Montana, as well as small contiguous portions of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and eastern Montana. BPA’s wholesale customers include public utilities, public utility districts, municipal districts, public cooperatives, some investor-owned utilities, and a few large industries such as aluminum companies. In addition to the transmission network within the Northwest, BPA operates large interregional transmission lines that connect to Canada, California, and the Southwest. Widespread brownouts and blackouts follow the explosion—followed by the collapse of the western grid. And then? What happens when the power goes out? When radiation spikes and the Pacific Northwest empties in a matter of days?
The loss of Boeing and Precision Castparts brings the airline industry to a halt.
The loss of Intel’s largest fabrication center, where most of the world’s computer chips are produced and designed, results in a major disruption in the computer and chip market.
Costco collapses. And other companies nearly follow suit, with their heads cut off—Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Microsoft, Starbucks, Cray Computers, Amazon, Safeco and PEMCO, Nordstrom, REI, Alaska Airlines, MSNBC, Nintendo, T-Mobile, Eddie Bauer, Expedia, Greenbrier, and Daimler Trucks.
Seattle’s port, and Portland’s to a smaller degree, brings in many of the products shipped to the U.S. from Asia, a capacity that cannot be covered by other harbors.
Even Facebook is affected, with one of its major data centers in Prineville shut down in an instant.
All of which causes panic and panic causes the collapse of the stock market and the collapse of the stock market triggers a worldwide depression, so that when January 20 comes and Chase is sworn into office in the middle of a blizzard, he knows he has been sentenced to carry the blame. He has virtually no public or congressional support. Partisan disagreements have twice created threats of partial government shutdowns and nearly caused a historic governmental default on their debt.
It is too much to bear.
After the women gather their clothes, after they whisper harshly at each other to hurry, after the door clicks closed, he leaps from his chair. He knocks the lamp from the table, sweep
s the briefings to the floor. Before the snowstorm of paper can settle, he marches over to the portraits of Roosevelt and Jackson, ripping them from their hooks, hurling them across the room, one of them striking an antique globe that gashes the canvas. He chucks a pillow, drags the duvet off the bed, and feels sickened by the smell of perfume that lingers here like some contamination. He tears the curtains from their rods and moonlight spills through the windows and makes the suite the color of underwater. He punches the wall and curses at the pain and tucks his hand into his armpit and staggers into the bathroom and snatches a bottle of Volpexx from the cabinet and twists off its top as if breaking the neck of a bird.
The bathroom is windowless, a marble cell. He observes his shadowy image in the mirror. He appears a phantom. He has been close to death before, but it always felt like something that could be avoided, something that gave off an almost repellant force. Now the opposite seems true, as if it were an inevitability, a dark mouth drawing him in.
One thing leads to another. Cause and effect. If one person’s choice to pack a plane with C-4 could open up a crater that the entire nation has collapsed into, then maybe he could make a choice too, one that might be similarly impactful. The choice to heal. He imagines something beginning here, in this moment, that would spread outward and affect everyone.
He breathes heavily when he stands over the toilet and shakes the bottle empty and flushes, knowing that if he waits another moment he might end up dipping his head into the bowl and palming to his mouth the pills already dissolving there.
He hears a knock. There is always a knock. That is the problem with this place. He can never be alone. Even here, on the second story, his residence, someone is always posted in the hall, always watching, always asking if he needs something, as if he were infirm or a child with a lost expression. He prefers Camp David.
Red Moon Page 44