Another fly finds him, landing at the corner of his mouth, and he spits it away. More appear, dozens more, buzzing lazily around him in the shape of a net. One lights on his skin and he swats at it. He looks back the way he came—brick buildings, overgrown grass with a narrow path cutting through and edged by maples—nothing that would attract so many flies.
They buzz around him and drown out every other noise in the world. He can feel the vibration of their wings just as he could feel the four-stroke engine trembling through his bones. The day is cloudless, the sun bright and at that afternoon angle that blinds. He holds up a hand to shade his eyes. He rounds the corner of a building and sees the body at the same moment he smells it.
Twenty yards ahead, in the knee-deep grass, in the shadow of a round-roofed building, Patrick can see a splash of dried blood the size of a quilt. In the middle of it lies the body, mangled, recently dead. When Patrick approaches, he smells the blood and the rotten matter of intestines and feels bile rising in his throat and tents his shirt over his nose.
The birds have disturbed the body. The face is gone, as if peeled off, to reveal the gleaming bone beneath. His throat has been torn open, and ligaments, like piano wires, remain taut in their place even as the flesh has been stripped away around them. His button-down shirt is spread to either side of him like wings, revealing the carved-out place beneath his rib cage where something burrowed its snout or claws. Patrick does not brush away the flies that have tasted the body and now taste of him, even as they crawl along his skin with their prickly legs. Instead he kicks the corpse.
The flies rise in an angry swarm. In that moment, Patrick can clearly see the lariat around his neck and the security badge that bears the name, Neal Desai.
He tries to move quietly. Whatever killed Desai killed him recently. Maybe the lycan with the guitar, maybe not. But no matter how softly he depresses his boots, they still crunch through the thousands of shards that once made up the glass entry to the Pfizer building. The interior is cool, high ceilinged, draped in shadows.
He checks all the rooms on the first floor and finds them empty. No chairs, no tables, no equipment, no clutter on the counters or in the cupboards. The facility is so new it hadn’t been inhabited. In researching Desai, Patrick vaguely recalls a photo popping up of him smiling, leaning on a shovel, some groundbreaking ceremony that must have taken place here.
He creeps down the central staircase. The sunlight dims. He pulls a mini Mag light from his cargo pocket and snaps it on and uses its beam to hollow out the darkness, to guide the bead of his pistol. A hallway stretches to either side of him. He can smell something down here—something that distinguishes itself from the smoke-scented air. A whiff of body odor.
He tracks the walls and doorways with his flashlight. Shadows move and lurch and he keeps waiting for one of them to come alive.
Ahead he spots an open door. He notes the keypad, notes the steel frame, a safe room of some sort. The smell is so tremendous he must breathe through his mouth.
He plays his flashlight around the room and spots a rumpled jacket in the corner—and then a laptop, a binder, a pile of manila folders and loose-leaf paper on the counter. He flips through them, noting dosage information, progress charts, chemical compositions that might as well be in a foreign language.
And then the beam of his flashlight reflects off a silver-topped glass container, something that sparkles like a tiny star.
Patrick is flying—he is nothing but air. The road twists through the Willamette Valley, toward the Cascades. With the bike humming beneath him and the wind like a woman’s fingers hurrying through his hair, bearing the smell of pine resin, damp loamy soil, he feels exhilarated. Everything he found in the lab is now in his backpack—including the vial, a vial full of powder, now wrapped up in his watch cap. The label on it reads: LOBOS VACCINE SAMPLE #342, 5ML, 10 DOSES.
Then he notices a gray cloud of smoke rising in the distance. Too big for a campfire, too indistinct for a burning house or field. And the cloud, Patrick realizes, is moving toward him.
He brakes and rolls onto the shoulder with a slurred crush of gravel. “Something’s coming,” he says to himself. Up ahead the road elbows into the trees. He focuses his eyes there, as if through the crosshairs of a scope, and the rest of the world falls away.
He senses, in a certain vibration of the air and the asphalt, engines. Lots of them.
His throat constricts, a lava-hot rush of blood makes his heart do a backflip, and deep inside him big chunks of black matter, stuff that has been lodged there forever, begins to melt away and infect him with a sick feeling. He has been numb for a long time. But this is fear. Unmistakable, remarkable fear.
Not for him, but for what he carries.
He blazes off the highway—into and out of the drainage ditch, its swampish bottom slippery, the bike almost sliding out from under him. He zigzags through the trees. Stiff weeds and clumps of scrub oak claw at the bike, screeching on its metal, and about thirty feet off the road—which seems too, too close—he brings the bike around a fallen tree and lays it on its side and starts covering it with branches.
The fallen tree is a Douglas fir, its needles a crisp brown, its bark interrupted by a jagged black vein made by lightning. When he pushes his way into its nest of branches, getting right up against the trunk, his hair prickles, his veins tighten. It is as if he can feel the residual electricity.
By now a faint reverberation is audible and he ducks down and listens to the noise get louder and louder still, and then around the corner comes a train of vehicles: motorcycles, jacked-up pickups, Cadillacs with red flames painted along their sides. All of them cough up oil like outboards, their ruined shocks and cracked mufflers and shrieking brakes rolling together to make a musical noise, like some junkyard circus, surrounded by a mystically blue exhaust that rises and joins the sky.
On top of one Cadillac, bodies are tied down like trophy stags. If they are not dead they are near it. Blood runs off the roof, down the windshield, where the wipers wipe it away. Patrick can see the man behind the wheel, hunched over and squinting through all that redness, smiling. A rosary swings from his rearview mirror.
Just five minutes ago the world seemed weirdly clean and calm. Now, in the drifting fog of smoke, engines mutter and horns beep and heavy metal blasts from CD players and tattooed men grin into the wind and for a second it’s as if the meltdown never happened.
The caboose of the nightmare parade is a semi dragging a flatbed. On the flatbed are couches and chairs, arranged helter-skelter, with many men and women splayed out on them. Beer cans roll around their feet. Metal—maybe Pantera or Slayer—blasts from a boom box and nearly overwhelms the noise of the diesel engine. Five men circle a woman in a green bikini and dance—slightly off-kilter from drink or turbulence—their hands outstretched like Halloween scarecrows. They are dirty and they are excited. Several are in a state of transformation.
At the rear of the flatbed a shirtless man swings logging chains above his head. With his pistol, Patrick sights the man’s chest, where excess flesh ripples down his rib cage, surrounding his guts, as if he has begun to melt after too long an exposure to Hanford’s furnace.
Patrick’s chest is a drum. Inside the drum, the fist of his heart bangs away and he feels clenched and jumpy and oblivious to the reckless stupidity of what he is about to do. His finger tightens around the trigger—in pure reflex—but before he can squeeze off a round, before the gun can jump in his hand, time seems to stop.
The music fades, replaced by several thundering cracks that make Patrick first look to his pistol and then to the cloud-swept sky, questioning their source. On the flatbed, a tiny red mouth opens below the big man’s left nipple. Then another at his temple. He doesn’t cry out or clutch his chest—he simply drops. He ceases to live. The physics of the impact work out like this: an ugly twist of limbs thrown from the flatbed, now baking on the hot pavement.
Then one of the rear tires rips apart and the rim gouges
the asphalt with a fan of sparks. The semi grinds to a halt. One of the couches rolls off and spills its occupants onto the road. The woman in the green bikini somehow keeps her balance. She is screaming. She is painted with blood. One of the men near her sways in place a moment before falling at her bare feet. Another joins him. The others realize, too late, they are under attack.
Their enemy comes from behind, a dozen dirt bikes racing along the highway, their engines the high whine of a chainsaw. They are ridden by men wearing camo pants and American flag T-shirts and black backpacks. Their heads are shaved. Their outstretched arms carry pistols, shotguns. Puffs of smoke rise with every gunshot.
Patrick is not as surprised as he ought to be. He feels instead that he should have known. He should have known what they, the Americans, were capable of becoming. Their own militia.
They do not slow their speed when they approach the semi. Their formation splits and they fire from either side of the flatbed when they pass it. Bodies drop. Blood mists the air. A lycan leaps onto one of the bikes and drags its driver to the pavement and they skid and spin together for a good twenty yards before going still.
Soon everyone is dead except the woman in the green bikini. She has transformed and crouches on all fours and cries out gutturally when one of the Americans—Max, Patrick feels certain, from his bullet-shaped head and short, round stature—climbs onto the flatbed and approaches her. He runs a blade along her neck and then her hairline. Her scalp he shoves into a trash bag.
He is certain the clouds will break and the sun will glint off the Night Train’s exposed muffler and one of the Americans will point a finger in his direction and yell, “There!” And that will be it—he will be dead—the vaccine will be lost. The Americans will surround him, as they did that day in the woods, and finish the job they started then.
But no, they climb on their dirt bikes and growl off into the distance, aware of nothing but themselves.
Nearby a bird shrieks the all clear and the forest returns to its business, twittering and chattering. With a gush of air Patrick realizes he has been holding his breath.
He is not sure what he expected to find at the labs. Answers. An answer may be what he has found. But what will come of this answer only makes more questions pour through his head like cement. His first impulse is to run. Escape to safety. But once he crosses the border there will be consequences. Consequences for him. And, if the military is able to draw from the vial something of value, there will be consequences of a much larger order. Consequences for all lycans. It’s hard to know whether he is talking about wiping out a disease or an identity, what has essentially become its own race or species. Though at first Patrick felt elated, as if he found in the vial something given up for lost, his body now suffers some weird jolt—a power surge of fear—followed by a draining sensation.
The breeze picks up, and when he breathes it in, when he heaves a sigh, he can smell blood and gunpowder in the air. Plagues don’t just kill people—and that’s what lobos is, a plague—they kill humanity.
He returns his pistol to its holster and hauls up the Night Train and rolls it over to the road. He tries not to look at the bodies strewn across the highway, the blood pooling around them like oil slicks, when he gets on the bike. He lets the engine run for a minute, then guns the accelerator, spraying dust everywhere, his eyes black bagged and full of haunting questions, like the wounded who return home from a lost war. He needs to think. He needs to find a place to hole up and think this through.
Chapter 63
STORMS BREW, but no rain falls. Thunder mutters and lightning ripples and the air grows unnaturally dark and almost solid with humidity. Weather vanes and cell towers and mailboxes and doorknobs and flagpoles sizzle with blue electricity. The wind rises. On the porch of the farmhouse, a rocking chair rocks on its own. A chime dances, its reeds clattering out a skeletal song.
It is evening when Tío gathers the men in the chapel. Candles glow and sputter. Wind gasps through the cracks in the walls. The men sit in the pews and Tío paces before them, pausing only to speak in rapid-fire bursts of Spanish. The men hold bones in their hands, like drumsticks, that they clack together whenever Tío says something declarative, the same way one might offer up an Amen!
Claire watches this from outside, the ceiling of the sky occasionally lit by lightning. She hears a soft padding in the grass and discovers Roxana standing nearby, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes are prickling with tears. Her mouth is opening and closing without any sound. In her face there is terrible fear and hatred. “You’re going to kill some wolves with my tío.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re a wolf.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not all the same.”
Claire approaches her and reaches out and combs some pine dander from her hair. “No, we’re not.”
“Some are good and some are bad.”
“Same as people.”
“You’re one of the good guys, right?”
“I think so.”
“I ran away from them when they were drunk, when they were sleeping. But I wish I hadn’t. Run away. I wish I had stayed. And killed them.” The candles reflect off the girl’s eyes, little gold sunbursts mixed into the brown pools. “I hope you blow all their guts out.” Roxana says this point-blank, without a trace of humor or pity, and then takes a few steps back, as if to escape the memory attached to her words. Thunder grumbles overhead. Tío barks out something in Spanish and the men clack their bones.
Claire’s father used to read westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. In those wrinkled paperbacks, the heroes spend a lot of time seeking revenge. If somebody, usually a guy with a black mustache, kills a friend or a family member, it is your duty to pay him back in lead. It is the just and courageous thing to do, the only thing to do. Right now she feels this way about Balor, about the Resistance. Putting bullets and blades into them feels like the only thing to do. Tearing into them, one by one, reciprocating the pain they have caused. Even if she is outnumbered, even if her head ends up on a pike, she feels she owes it to Roxana, she owes it to Matthew, she owes it to Miriam, she owes it to her parents, she owes it to the hundreds of thousands displaced and ruined by the meltdown, herself included, seeking some sort of absolution.
She looks to the sky. The clouds have torn open in places to reveal stars. Some look to the sky and see wishes, heavenly possibilities. She sees a morgue bright with the glinting white of bones. She is ready to kill. She is angry, and the anger is good. It means there is something still flaming inside her. It means she hasn’t yet gone to ash.
Inside, Tío’s voice grows louder and the men clack their bones faster and faster until the sounds merge into one terrible war cry.
* * *
The low-slung sun smolders through the clouds as if they were a shriveling purply brown piece of hot plastic. Twilight rises from the mountains like smoke, fingering its way across the sky. Thunder sounds. Lightning flares. Patrick zigzags along some side roads and discovers, down the end of a long driveway, hidden in a thicket of trees, a cabin made of peeling gray logs. One bedroom, one bath. Only a few windows. No place anyone would ever want to live. Safe.
There is a stream nearby. The water is white with minerals and comes from the old glaciers way up in the Cascades. He strips off his clothes and climbs into it and grinds his teeth against the cold. When he bathes, when he dunks his head and scrubs his skin with sand, huge trout curl around him and dart all up and down the river, their rainbow scales glowing beneath the water. Sometimes the fish taste Patrick, taking his toes or fingers into their prickly mouths, chewing, and he finds the sensation strangely pleasant. For a moment he worries whether the water is cleaning him or dirtying him—the radiation washed right off the mountains and into his skin—but then he stops worrying. He has room in him for only so much.
Before locking up the cabin and dropping the blinds, Patrick stands on the porch to survey the night. Especially at this time
of day, when darkness settles in and the towns no longer glow, the broken streets and empty buildings and burned-out cars as black as charred wood, the bats swooping and the frogs peeping and the Cascades a cutout against an ink-wash sky, it is easy for him to believe that all other human life has been extinguished.
He lights up the cabin with flashlights he finds in drawers, a propane lantern he finds in a closet. He eats an MRE, guzzles a canteen of water. A shelving unit in the living room is loaded with books—westerns, romances, science-fiction stories—and though he has never liked reading much, he paws through them now not just for entertainment, but also for the comfort of following smart people who say all the right things and in the end figure stuff out.
Fifteen minutes later he hasn’t made it more than a few pages. Every time he tries to read a word, the letters scramble away from him. He ends up tossing the book aside and staring at the wall. There is too much in his mind, too many possibilities branching before him depending on what choice he makes.
A long time ago, every goal was so material: I want a fast red car, I want a sexy wife, I want a great job, I want a house with a field out back where I can play catch with my kid. Now every need has become an abstraction and he is left with a carved-out soreness he recognizes as homesickness. Not just the want to go back to California—the want to spin the globe backward like a clock and rediscover that moment in life.
In the vial lies that very possibility. A cure for a sick world.
Any anxiety Patrick might have—about getting court-martialed, about handing over the vial—is laid to rest now. The world needs to move on, to heal.
Red Moon Page 48