Red Moon

by Benjamin Percy

  A knock is never a good thing. A knock means more bad news about economic growth slowing to a crawl, about oil and food prices shooting through the roof—about how slashing interest rates has not helped after raising interest rates has not helped—about the S&P double downgrade, about inflation, joblessness, homelessness—about how angry everyone is, how very angry, his approval rating at 30 percent. This is all his fault, they say. Violence begets violence. If he worked more on integration, the Resistance would have nothing to resist. And now it is too late. And now a section of the country and the populace has been carved away as if by a knife. His efforts to reclaim the Ghostlands are pointless, a waste of money and resources. The other day the New York Times ran a column that referred to cleanup and antiterror efforts in the Pacific Northwest as “a lost battle. Like raking leaves in the wind.”

  Again the knock at the door. More of a thud really. As if someone has hurled an arm against it, demanding to be let in. Rather than answer it, he stands looking out the window. A guard with a German shepherd patrols the lawn. A cherry tree snows blossoms that appear in the moonlight as white as shredded paper. The moon hangs like a cool blue disc in the sky. He cannot see any stars, not with the glow of the city all around him, but he discerns a red light, what must be Mars.

  Maybe the knock is not bad news after all. Maybe it is one of the whores back for a forgotten earring. Maybe it is an agent who heard Chase ripping apart his room, who wants to confirm the president is all right and ask whether he would like something, maybe a sandwich or maybe housekeeping to help him put everything back in order.

  The door opens and Buffalo stands for a moment at the threshold of the suite and the light from the hallway throws his shadow clear across the dark room and makes him appear momentarily as tall as a giant. “Chase?” he says and fumbles for the light switch.

  “Leave them off.”

  Buffalo’s hand drops to his side. He lets the door swing closed behind him and squints into the darkness, his eyes unadjusted. “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Chase says. “Everything.”

  Buffalo trips over the ghostly heap of the duvet. “I can’t see worth a damn, you know that.” He snaps on a floor lamp and then shakes his head at the spilled folders. He crouches down and then gives up on tidying them and retrieves the fallen lamp and sets it on the table again and tries to adjust its broken shade before illuminating it. His glasses glow gold. “We may have something on Balor.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “The Pittock Mansion. In Portland. We’re not one hundred percent, but the satellites have picked up a lot of activity there.” He explains the need to act. He says what he has already said a dozen times before: that this is their moment, following the containment of the territories and disablement of all infrastructure, to put maximum pressure on the lycans. “They’re up against the ropes. If we keep up the pressure, we’ll cripple them.”

  They have been through all of this before. How they need to make Balor their priority. How they need to cut off the snake’s head. How the Resistance will convulse awhile, but then go still.

  Now that Jeremy Saber is out of the picture, Buffalo tells him, their number two seems to be Jonathan Puck. From England. Twice deported. Twenty-seven convictions. Theft, assault, rape, narcotics, unlawful intimidation, possession of an illegal firearm. “And—get this—he’s five-two. A little big man. No chance somebody with that kind of stature or temperament can lead or galvanize all those moving parts.”

  Buffalo could talk all night. Chase cuts him off. “Send our guy.”

  “I was going to suggest a missile strike.”

  “No military. They fucked up twice already. Blasting their way through that elementary school full of Mexicans. Bombing that dam and flooding a whole goddamn town of people.”

  “We’re not talking about people. We can’t think of the insurgents that way.”

  “News fucking chopper overhead with all those bodies floating around like cordwood. Quiet and clean. That’s how we’re going to do it.”

  “Are we?”

  “Send him. End of discussion. I want a severed head to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Chase silences any further argument with a lashing gaze.

  They both take a step away from each other, and they are heavy men now, so the floorboards whine beneath them. Buffalo observes him worriedly and removes a pen from his pocket and bites the tip as if it were a pipe stem. “Is everything okay?”

  Chase remembers the roar of the toilet, the confetti twirl of the pills as they vanished down the drain. He thinks about telling Buffalo. Telling him he wants to get clean, just for a little while. Flush the system. See if the old Chase comes wandering out of the fog. But he can’t. That’s what Buffalo will tell him—he can’t. And he is tired of being told what to do. “Everything is fucking awesome. Can’t you tell?” Chase cannot meet his eyes. He studies the floor, where the lamps staggered around the room entangle their shadows.

  “You should be happy. Be happy. This is what we’ve been working toward. All these years.” His voice is small.

  “This?” Chase says. “This is what we’ve been working toward?” He sweeps an arm to indicate the mess in his suite, the ruins surrounding them. “You can have it.”

  Chapter 59

  THAT MORNING, before the sun breaks the sky, Patrick creeps out of his bunk and shoulders his backpack—stuffed with a poncho, canteen, a few MREs and Snickers bars, GPS, satellite phone, waterproof matches, iodine tabs—and hurries to the vehicle lot. Yesterday, outside the mess hall, Malerie confirmed her assignment and plate number. She and another nurse would be in a medical supply van crushed into a long line of Humvees and FMTVs, a cleaner convoy headed into the Ghostlands. In the vans, Malerie said, there is a hollow beneath the bench seat for extra storage. A hollow big enough for him to cramp his body inside.

  He told her thank you and she said he better not fuck up and he said he wouldn’t.

  They stood in silence awhile and then he said, “Well, I guess that’s that.” It was as close to good-bye as he could get. He blew her a kiss.

  “Missed,” she yelled, like he was far away, not ten feet from her—and then, unsmiling, she crossed her arms and walked away.

  It is here, snapped under the seat with a crossbar pressing into his forehead, that he waits for the next hour, until the sun rises and the trumpet calls and everyone climbs out of their rack and voices busy the air and the doors chunk open and closed and someone settles onto the seat above him and the vehicles all around the lot roar to life. He cannot fill his lungs completely—that’s how tight the space is—and his neck is already cramping from having stared to the right for so long.

  The van makes a series of turns, braking at the checkpoint with the rest of the squad, then rumbling up to speed as they head into the Ghostlands. Patrick cannot see out the window, but he knows the drive and can imagine it clearly as they cross the sage flats, the blacktop edged by red cinder, rabbitbrush rising from sandy washes like so many broom heads. Clouds wisp the sky. Turkey vultures ride thermals. Juniper trees twist upward like skeletons in torment. Black-and-red cinder cones hump the desert. Canyons are lined with basalt columns like ancient churches.

  He counts off the seconds as they pass and imagines a clock inside him, a clock with many red and black wires curling out of it, that will eventually click its way down to zero and explode. He wishes they would hurry. Already he feels like he is too late.

  The convoy stops in Prineville, where they have been ordered to sweep the east side of town for bodies, kill any insurgents, detain any illegals, and torch all markets and grocery stores. He mouths, “Come on, come on, come on, come on,” and waits an interminable amount of time as the van parks and the engine quiets and the nurses climb out and Malerie double-taps the door to give the all clear before he clicks the seat upward like a coffin lid and snaps his neck left, then right.

  He hurls the brick into the display window of the Harley dealer and stands there with t
he glass all around him like the thousand jagged possibilities waiting for him in the Ghostlands.

  The Night Train is a big bike, sixty-three horsepower. He wants to hurry but can’t help but pause a moment to run his hands along the curves of it, smear his fingerprints and fog his breath along the metal. He scores the keys from a hook in a locked office. There is a generator in the corner. He guns it to life. The shop has its own gas pump and he tops off the tank and fills four canteens he stores in the saddlebags.

  Patrick left his hazmat gear back at the base. The full-body suit, gloves, and boots—made from a nano-composite material called Demron—shield him from gamma rays and radiation particles but slow him down, make him sweat. He will be gone only two days and he will pop iodine tabs every few hours to fight the radiation and he will stay away from the northern half of the state and hopefully the overall effect will be no more severe than him standing in front of a microwave for a few hours.

  He rolls the Night Train into the lot, turns on the fuel supply, pulls out the choke, hits the ignition, sets the kill switch to run, releases the clutch. The growl of the engine has enough thunder to turn heads all over town. The cleaners will know someone is here. He has only a few minutes before someone comes hunting for him.

  He wobbles onto the street in first gear—nearly stalling out—and then throttles forward. Once he gets onto Highway 126, he kicks his speed up to seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, and the world blurs into a smear of colors and makes him forget, just for a second, who and where he is.

  Outside town, he can see weeds creeping through the cracks in the asphalt, deer bedded down in an overgrown golf course. Nature thrives. Patrick has heard it all. How at night Multnomah Falls glows a faint red, as if the earth is bleeding. How raccoons, as bald as babies, overturn garbage cans and clamber through cupboards. Mountain lions slink about with tusks like sabers. Pterodactyl-like birds silhouette the open guts of the moon. An albino bear as big as a garbage truck sharpens its claws on a telephone pole.

  Then there are the dogs. They run now in packs. They live in the woods and in the abandoned houses, cozying up to the couches and beds they were for so long forbidden to dirty. They come for him now, outside Prineville, at the bottom of a canyon, his engine’s noise drawing them from the juniper forest—ears perked, heads cocked—as if summoned. They give chase, wailing like demons, their dark shapes surrounding him. They pop their teeth and he kicks at them and nearly loses control of his bike. They keep pouring out of the woods—close to forty of them. He dodges their bodies like a halfback and zooms up and up and up the switchback highway that rises from the canyon, until he reaches its plateau, a viewpoint overlooking the dry basin of Crook County. He parks and gets off the bike, and sure enough, several hundred feet below him, gray and black and brown, the dogs race along the highway, following his scent.

  Christmas is the last time he saw his mother. This was before he deployed for the Republic, and he spent a good deal of his holiday eating. Everything from cinnamon rolls to meatloaf to asparagus casserole, everything he could get his hands on and knew he would not taste outside a mess hall for a long time.

  “Come back to me,” his mother kept telling him. His last day before climbing on a plane to Los Alamitos, California, she pumped his hand furiously, as if to distance her affection, and then couldn’t stand it anymore and drew him into a hug. When they pulled apart, she smiled a sad smile and touched his face. “Aren’t you scared?” she said, and he said, “Course I’m scared.”

  And he was, but not anymore. That nerve seems to have been excised from his body. As much as he checks and checks, and keeps on checking, as far as he can tell, ever since he came back from the Republic, he has not been scared, not sad, not excited, not feeling much of anything, his numbness like armor.

  Which is why he feels so surprised by the sour twist in his stomach when he roars up to his mother’s home in a squall of gravel. He is—no other word for it—afraid. For a long time he stands at the front door, not knowing what to do, studying for clues in the wood grain. When he finally steps inside, he does so with care, to honor the tomblike stillness of the place and also to keep from stirring the dust.

  He tours each room, certain he will find his mother in one of them, and when he doesn’t, he feels no relief, only assent to his prolonged suffering, like a patient whose nurse cannot find a vein while repeatedly stabbing a needle into the crook of an elbow. He climbs on his bike and drives through Old Mountain, past the dump, to the wooded subdivision, where he discovers her at last.

  They have been hanged, the doctor and his mother, his mother recognizable only by her clothes, her skin otherwise black or stripped from the bone by birds. The noose knotted around her neck rises seven feet to the thick branch of a juniper tree. She sways in the breeze and so does the doctor’s head. It hangs beside her, like some ghoulish ornament, but his body has long ago rotted away from his neck and fallen to the driveway, an angular pile of bones draped in weather-aged khaki. The smell of decay still clings to the air like some terrible perfume.

  Across the garage door, in black block letters, someone has spray-painted Go to hell lycans. And beneath it, in smaller script, Sincerely, The Americans.

  Patrick tries to sob but can’t pull it off, managing more of a cough. Then his face splits open as rocks do when water freezes inside them, and he begins to cry. He touches the corners of his eyes as if to push the tears back inside him. He hates how weak and helpless he feels. He hates it so much that he charges the juniper tree and kicks it and a loose branch falls and strikes his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that will take a long time to shrink and pale and vanish.

  Chapter 60

  THE LYCANS are not alone. There are others—Mexicans mainly—who live in the Ghostlands. Like Claire, most are here because they feel they have nowhere else to go. At the perimeter, once the military discovers they are undocumented, they will be jailed and then deported. They could always return to the States by following a coyote through a dirt tunnel and across the desert. But why? The invisible threat of radiation, the sores that fester on their skin, mean nothing compared to the overcrowding, the joblessness, the anemic economy, found everywhere else.

  They do not have access to iodine. Their hair is falling out. They are covered in radiation burns. But they also drive Mercedes and BMWs and Land Rovers. They shop at the abandoned Nordstrom and Macy’s. Some live in gated subdivisions, in five-​bedroom homes furnished by Pottery Barn, but most have stuck to the farms where they once worked, where they know the land from which they can harvest their apples and filberts, lettuce and grapes, raspberries, carrots, eggplant, sweet potatoes. A sustainable life.

  A week ago, Claire and Matthew happened upon fifty people hoeing and seeding fields. The way they were dressed, you would have thought it was a cocktail party. At the edge of the field an old man in a tuxedo rocked in a rocking chair, his beard as white as corn silk. When they turned off the highway and biked down the long clay road that led to the fields, the old man rose unsteadily from his chair, lifted what appeared to be a cane, and fired. A yellow carnation bloomed from the front of the shotgun, followed by the roar and spray of buckshot that from a good fifty yards’ distance only stung their skin. They turned back the way they came.

  This is where the girl comes from—a farm, she says—a farm outside Salem. Her name is Roxana. “Roxana Primavera Rivera,” she says in a proud, careful voice like she might have once used in a classroom. She is nine and a half. She was in the third grade before the sky caught on fire, before everyone abandoned this place. She hates math but loves reading. That is all there is to do anymore, she says, is read. Besides work. She has the whole library to herself and loves sexy vampire books especially. Her parents are dead—shot by soldiers when on a supply run. Her uncle takes care of her now. He is a pretty scary man, she says, her tío. Everyone is afraid of him. “But he’s nice to me.”

  She talks breathlessly while they ride their bikes along the back roads, Cla
ire on her eighteen-speed Trek, Roxana on a Huffy with pink streamers that sizzle in the wind. They found the bike in Bi-Mart, along with a grandpa-style pocketknife, a box of bullets, candy bars. They have pedaled maybe ten miles when the girl asks why they can’t just drive a car, and Claire tells her what Matthew once told her: “Because gas is hard to come by. And because in a car you can’t hear what’s coming.”

  Her voice is scolding and impatient. She wishes she’d never found the girl. She is just one more thing to deal with, to worry about. If she had died in the cemetery, she would have died in the cemetery. She would have been another body. As simple as that. But now, if anything should happen, her death will belong to Claire like a diseased limb. So she must deliver the girl safely back to her family even as other thoughts occupy her mind. She sees, in the prickle of grass, in the bunching of clouds, the knots on a tree, the vision of Balor, and she imagines how she might get close enough to him to drag a blade across his neck or punch a bullet through his body.

  She knows he is here—in Oregon, in Portland—feeding and supplying those loyal to him, trying to build an army, declaring this their rightful sovereign territory. She has seen GOD BLESS THE RESISTANCE graffitied across the capitol building, seen posters declaring this place Lycanica. She knows that’s why drones and choppers buzz overhead, why missiles sometimes come streaking out of the sky to open up the earth. He is being hunted.

  This winter she and Matthew met someone—a man with a ratty beard and soiled North Face jacket who came out of the night to join their campfire. He held up his hands and said he only wanted some company. “I’m cool,” he said. “I’m one of the good guys.” And he was. There were many in the Ghostlands Claire knew would slit her throat, rip off her clothes—and that’s why she and Matthew always kept their guns at their waists—but the criminal element was offset by men like this—Robbie, he said his name was—political idealists and peaceable foragers more interested in lying low and living their own lives than getting caught up in a war against humanity.