Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  CHAPTER 13

  Open House

  I followed Pettis out of the supermarket. The sun was perched on the high wire of the horizon. In twenty minutes it would fall into night.

  Pettis led me up the block past a dry cleaner’s and the post office, then turned into the small court that fronted the town’s hotel, a picturesque reproduction of an Old West boarding house. Hitching posts curbed the parking spaces, and there were swinging doors into the lobby. Inside, there was lots of varnished Ponderosa pine.

  We walked past the abandoned front desk through the dining room. Bubble windows were set in the high-raftered ceiling, shafting dim ovals of twilight onto the polished floor. I held my shotgun up. Pettis seemed unconcerned, swinging his rifle at his side.

  At the back of the dining room, we pushed through another swinging door to the kitchen. It was a mess. Pans had been scattered from their shelves. A long knife stood straight out of one wall. The aluminum sinks were scratched and tarnished. A section of the floor was ripped up, linoleum peeled back, floorboards cracked, a new network of nails holding them in place.

  “No way that’ll hold,” Pettis said angrily.

  Three piles of bones lay next to the sink. Pettis paused to kick one of them, scattering the bones. He went to a battered steel door that looked like it led to the back alley but instead opened onto a short hallway. The hallway ended in another door, this one low and almost square, a solid piece of windowless steel bordered by concrete.

  Pettis knocked with the butt end of his rifle on the square door. There was an answering knock. Someone said Pettis’s name, muffled through the door. Pettis answered, “Yes.”

  The door opened, revealing a slight, balding man with spectacles that had been mended at the bridge. He looked scared, his rabbit eyes darting from Pettis to me and back to Pettis.

  “He’s with us tonight,” Pettis said, and the man, who had been ineffectively blocking the entrance, moved aside. There was a stool set near the hinges of the door and he collapsed onto it. Under the stool was a .38-caliber pistol. The man opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He began to tremble.

  Finally, he blurted out, “How long I gotta stay here, Cowboy?”

  Pettis didn’t look at him. “Till the sun goes down.”

  The man’s eyes went wide with fear. “You won’t—”

  “I won’t leave you here, Cooper,” Pettis snapped. “You’re no goddamn good to me. I’ll send two men up in a little while.” Seeing Cooper’s lips trembling to speak again, Pettis added, “Before the Moon rises.”

  As Cooper closed and bolted the door behind us, a look of mild relief filling his frightened features, Pettis turned to me and snorted, “Engineer.”

  We walked a narrow hallway that ended abruptly in a steep flight of stairs down. Pettis descended without hesitation. He was a graceful man, his movements catlike.

  There was another short hallway at the bottom of the stairs. At the end of it was another door. Pettis banged impatiently on it. It opened immediately to reveal a young girl of twelve or thirteen.

  “Didn’t I tell all of you not to open this door without knowing who’s on the other side?” Pettis said sharply.

  “I—I heard—”

  “Don’t tell me what you heard. That could have been anyone up there talking to Cooper.”

  A short woman with dark hair appeared. She put a slim hand on the girl’s shoulder and moved her gently back, confronting Pettis herself.

  “I asked Amy to watch while I went to the bathroom,” she said harshly.

  “You should have been here yourself,” Pettis answered. “The girl—”

  The woman turned and walked away.

  Pettis’s face flared in anger. He turned to the door we had passed through, slammed and bolted it.

  “Myerson? Biancalata?” he called.

  Two young men appeared. One of them had glasses with lenses as thick as a thumb.

  Pettis looked at his watch. “In fifteen minutes, the two of you go upstairs with shotguns. Send Cooper down. And by the way, you did a lousy job with the kitchen floor up there.”

  “We did what we could.”

  “It stinks.”

  The two didn’t look pleased as they walked away.

  “More engineers,” Pettis said derisively.

  “How many people have you got down here?” I asked.

  Pettis looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “We had forty to start. Now there’s eleven. With you, twelve.” He began to walk away. “For now.”

  I followed him through the narrow entranceway into a large but claustrophobic room. Industrial metal shelving lined one entire wall. The opposite wall held a row of lockers. The center of the room was carpeted with sleeping bags.

  Seeing me studying the double row of recessed ceiling lights, Pettis explained, “Battery system.”

  In one far corner, a group consisting of another engineer type with a cigarette in his mouth, a young man in a private’s Army uniform, two older women, and an older man who looked startlingly like pictures I’d seen of Robert Oppenheimer, talked over a card game.

  Pettis called, “Doc?” and the old man turned his head to regard us with his bird-black eyes.

  His accent was English. “What is it, Cowboy?”

  “What time tonight?”

  “About seven-ten. I should think it will be the worst we’ve seen.”

  Doc went back to the game of poker, giving his fan of cards the same rapt attention he had given Pettis’s question.

  I must have looked blankly at Pettis, because he said, “Moonrise. Each night, as the Moon waxes, the wolves have been worse.”

  I remembered the date, December sixteenth. “Tonight it’s full.”

  “That’s right,” he answered, quietly.

  Myerson and Biancalata appeared. They were armed, and Pettis brought them upstairs. Cooper scurried down with cries of thankfulness.

  I tried to talk to him but he would have nothing to do with me. He went to a corner of the room where he sat turned to the wall, talking to himself.

  I walked past the poker game to the small kitchen behind the common room. The woman and the young girl were cooking on an electric range, emptying open cans of chili into a large saucepan.

  “Was this place built as a bomb shelter?” I asked.

  The woman nodded curtly without looking up. “The owners of the hotel built it in 1962. They thought Kennedy was going to blow the world up. There’s even a morgue built into the back.”

  “Biancalata and Myerson didn’t look too happy about taking first watch,” I said.

  “That’s because they’ll be dead in an hour,” she answered, tight-lipped. Her knuckles were hard white on the wooden spoon she used on the chili.

  “What do you mean?”

  She still refused to look at me, staring at the pot of chili in front of her.

  “Why doesn’t Pettis just leave the hallway empty upstairs, and guard the door leading into here?”

  The young girl spoke up. “Because if someone doesn’t stop them upstairs, they’ll rip the door open here and kill us all. If somebody kills a couple of them upstairs, the rest go for the dead bodies. They go into a feeding frenzy. But last night they killed the men upstairs and almost got in. There were more of them than there were the first night, and they were stronger. Tonight…” She left her thought unsaid, gathering the empty chili cans and carrying them from the kitchen.

  The other woman stood tense, her hand gripped tight around her spoon.

  Innocently, more out of curiosity than provocation, I asked, “What do you have against Pettis?”

  She looked at me then, with the hard icy glare of fear. I thought she would strike me. Her face was splotched red, and tears cornered her eyes.

  “Get out!” she sobbed. “Please just get out!”

  Embarrassed, I backed out of the kitchen. The young girl brushed past me to hold the woman as she cried.

  The card game had broken up. The engin
eer was shuffling the cards together while four of the others readied the table they had been playing on for dinner. Doc stood alone, tapping an unlit cigarette against his palm. He looked even more like Robert Oppenheimer now; he was tall and thin and slightly stooped, with an air of detachment hovering around him that Oppenheimer’s colleagues had often described.

  Pettis returned from upstairs, went to the kitchen and appeared with two bowls of chili for Myerson and Biancalata. When he returned he closed and bolted the door.

  The bolt sliding home had a final sound to it, like the last nail in a coffin. There was a palpable, growing tension in the air, the pressure of coming battle. The bomb shelter was like a fort before the next attack, anticipation souring the atmosphere.

  The woman and girl appeared in the kitchen doorway with the pot of chili.

  “Dinner,” the woman called, tonelessly.

  It was a cheerless meal, with little conversation. The card playing engineer, named Rhodes, chided the Army private about his poker strategy; the private smiled distractedly and studied his chili bowl. Doc ate as if he wouldn’t have noticed if he had been served dog food. The two older women, who reminded me of nuns out of habit, stared at the table, intent on not drawing attention to themselves.

  I ate as much as I could. To me, the meal, the first hot nourishment I had had in three days, was anything but dog food. When the young girl produced a plate of

  Oreo cookies for dessert, along with Styrofoam cups filled with hot coffee, I nearly cried with pleasure. A week ago, this meal in this place would have seemed hell; this night, it was paradise.

  But the tension in the room was rising. Finishing my second cup of coffee, I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. The rest didn’t seem to need a watch. Brittle silence was broken now and again by the engineer’s coughing; after the fit passed he would light another cigarette, pulling one from a pack in his pocket, then discarding the pack to take another from the half-full carton next to him. I hadn’t seen him without a cigarette since the poker game.

  At seven o’clock Pettis looked at Doc, who nodded. Everyone got up, retrieved weapons from the lockers against the wall, and retired to various spots in the room. Even the young girl had a handgun.

  Pettis unbolted the shelter door. Two empty chili bowls were there. With his boot he kicked them into the room.

  “Anything up there?” he called to Biancalata and Myerson.

  Somewhere far off, I heard a howl, then another.

  Myerson’s deep voice answered, nervously, “It’s starting.”

  Pettis turned to me. “Lock it behind me. I yell, open it quick.”

  Doc ambled over to look into the darkened hallway leading to the steps upstairs. He had a cigarette of his own dangling from his fingers. He wore a seriously bemused look. He looked at me as if I was something worth studying.

  “He trusts you,” Doc said, smiling slightly.

  “That surprises you?”

  “He doesn’t trust anybody.”

  I locked and checked the bolts on the door. “Does anybody trust him?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes.” He paused to lift his cigarette lazily to his mouth, then drop his hand again. “He’s been up there every night; saved Wilkins over there,” he gestured toward the chain-smoking engineer by brushing his hand in the man’s direction, “two nights ago. Without Pettis I doubt any of us would be alive.”

  Up above, beyond all the doors, in the night, I heard a clique of closer, hungrier howls.

  “The young woman with the girl doesn’t seem to think much of him.”

  Doc regarded me; his eyes were gray, clear, and even. “You mean Moira. I wouldn’t count on your assessment.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s his wife. The girl is his daughter.”

  A great noise sounded above us. Wilkins shouted, “They’re going to try from above!”

  The staccato of random noise became an avalanche. Up the stairs, outside our door, howls of rage mixed with the sounds of metal striking metal. I pressed my ear to the door, straining to hear Pettis’s voice should it come.

  Doc said, “There are at least a hundred of them up there now.” A particularly gruesome wail tore through the air, directly above our heads. Doc added, looking at the ceiling, “Perhaps more.”

  Doc moved to an empty spot between the Army private and the two older women, who huddled weaponless in the corner by the lockers.

  From above came the sound of ripping metal, followed by three gun blasts. I heard a scream. Two more shotgun blasts ensued; then I heard Pettis’s voice.

  “Open it!”

  I slid the bolts aside and it was thrown open. Pettis bulled his way in, dragging Myerson behind him. The left side of Myerson’s body was covered with blood. There were rake marks down his shoulder across his ribs to his belt, which had been sliced in half.

  “Close it!” Pettis screamed.

  I pushed the door closed and knocked the bolts into place. The others were dragging whatever wasn’t tied down toward the door. I stepped aside as a metal locker (dragged by the two older women, who had shaken themselves from their stupor), the wooden bench that had lined one wall, even the chairs we had sat on to eat our dinner, were piled up. Over these, the sleeping bags were thrown.

  It was clear from the ferocious wails of hunger emanating from the other side of the door what had happened to Biancalata.

  They dragged Myerson to the back end of the room near the kitchen. Pettis bent over him, ripping Myerson’s clothing, minutely examining the wounds.

  Doc shook his head. Pettis held him off. “The first one in got him,” he said. “Raked him up with a garden tool.” He continued to examine Myerson, ignoring the man’s cries. “I just don’t know if it got at him with the claws or not.”

  “Can we take the chance?” Doc asked reasonably.

  Pettis paused. “Yes, damn it.”

  Pettis wiped his bloody hands on his pants. Wilkins and Cooper stood nearby. “Put him in the kitchen,” Pettis ordered. “Bandage the wound. And then tie him up tight.” He eyed the engineers closely.

  Wilkins, a cigarette still in his mouth, nodded, and he and Cooper took Myerson away.

  Doc stared at the barricaded door, behind which the screams of wolves battling over blood had diminished somewhat. “It won’t be long.”

  Pettis looked at the ceiling. “Have they tried to get through that patch-up?” he asked.

  “No,” Doc replied.

  And then there came a sound that made everyone in the room, even Pettis, stop what they were doing and listen in awe and fear.

  I must try to describe this sound. It was a single keen, transformed into a choir, mounting in killing lust until the chorus became a single, numbing shriek of devotion and madness. It was the kind of sound the earth itself might make when opening up to release Satan from hell.

  “My God,” said Wilkins.

  “The full Moon,” Doc whispered, staring at his watch to see that it was, indeed, seven-ten, his predicted time of arrival.

  I could imagine it out there, rising over the edge of Earth—the Moon, Luna, Selene, who now sought mastery of her father planet. She was in triumph tonight; even now, new meteors would be spitting down from her face to secure conquest. I wondered if the Earth was to become the Moon herself, trading spiritual place with her parent. The Oedipus complex had come to planetary physics, with the transference of souls from a dead white world to a wet living one.

  The two old women were back in their lockerless corner, cowering. Pettis, Doc, and the others, myself included, stared up at the source of those horrible primal sounds, as if the ceiling had melted away, giving us the same cold view of the Moon the wolves enjoyed.

  “Jesus,” Pettis said, and I saw him trade a look with his wife. “Jesus.”

  Myerson moaned from the kitchen.

  That broke the spell. Pettis checked all firearms. “They’re going to come in fast,” he announced.

  They came in fast. The roaring
became a cacophony of mindless screams. The first assault struck the door. There was a loud tearing noise but the bolts held. One of the sleeping bags slid slowly from its perch atop the pile; as it folded to the floor, the second charge came. This time the barricade shuddered. On the third attack I heard the unmistakable groan of metal giving way.

  A chorus of shouts went up behind me. I heard a howl so close and full-throated that every hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up.

  Someone shouted behind me. I took my eyes from the barricaded door. There in the doorway of the kitchen was a blank shape that resolved into a wolf, mouth open, eyes burning.

  “It’s Myerson!” Wilkins shouted.

  The Army private, who was standing just outside the kitchen, screamed. Instead of firing his .44, he froze and stared up into the wolf’s face.

  Myerson lowered his head and took the private’s shoulder into it, raking his claws across the young man’s chest. Blood spurted everywhere at once.

  The private screamed, then went limp.

  Myerson shrieked and fell upon the dead body, slashing it to bits with the razors of his teeth and claws. He licked at every drop of blood, shredding clothes like crepe paper, devouring entrails, muscle, and tissue. The man’s exposed rib cage was cleaned dry. I watched in sickened fascination.

  “Enough,” Pettis said. He raised his rifle to fire but then jerked it higher and shot at something behind Myerson, a wolf shape just emerging from the kitchen.

  The wolf fell but another appeared behind it. Yellow eyes wide with rage and lust, it fell on the new corpse, tearing at it with its teeth.

  “Jesus, they dug into the kitchen!” Wilkins shouted. Another dark shape dropped down into the small room.

  A fusillade of gunfire erupted into the doorway of the kitchen. Backing into the barricade of cabinets and furniture, I fired twice, pausing to reload. When the smoke cleared, three dead beasts, Myerson among them, were piled near the kitchen opening. Another wolf had dropped into the kitchen and was already going for the bodies.

  I felt the barricade move toward me. The door was being pushed inward.

  Someone stumbled in my path, moving toward the kitchen. It was one of the old women. “Rebecca? Rebecca?” she called. I tried to grab her but she screamed when I touched her and stumbled away. A moment later I saw one of the wolves cover her like a cloak and she went down. I saw her friend nearby, a wolf pulling bloodily at her lifeless back.