Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  An hour into our trek, as the mountains began to thin out and lower to hills, Doc came gasping to a halt.

  “Got…to…rest,” he wheezed.

  Grudgingly, Pettis agreed. “Will a few minutes do it, Doc?”

  Doc shook his head. “Sorry, Cowboy. That won’t…do it.”

  “I’m pretty hungry myself,” Wyatt remarked, and Amy nodded in agreement.

  Cowboy looked for my vote. I said, “I notice you’ve still got your eye on that ridge up to the right.”

  He nodded, scratching his chin. “Still can’t be sure…” He looked at Doc, who hadn’t improved, and added, “All right, we’ll eat now.

  We camped near a weak stand of cottonwoods close to the highway. Cowboy opened a can of peach halves for himself, then moved away from us into a clearing. I waited until the can opener came around to me, then joined him.

  “What are you so worried about?” I asked, spooning fruit cocktail.

  “We’re moving too slow. The first hour we covered pretty good ground, but we’ve been slowing down steadily since. Not only that, but I’m pretty damn sure we’re being followed.”

  “Why haven’t we been attacked?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “I’m not sure. But however many there are, they’ve been drawing closer.” He finished the last of his peaches and tossed the can away. “I don’t like it.”

  We rejoined the others. Doc eyed Cowboy expectantly, a thin smile on his face. He looked much recovered. “I can wait for that tea, Cowboy. Sorry about the delay.”

  “I needed a rest myself, Doc. But we’re going to have to pick up the pace if we’re going to get to Kramer before dark.”

  “I understand.”

  “All right,” Pettis said, “let’s get moving.”

  “Dad,” Amy said hesitantly, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “You don’t have to ask permission, Amy.”

  “I…need a little privacy.”

  “I don’t want you going away,” Cowboy said.

  “There’s some brush over there,” she answered, pointing to a spot ten yards up the slope of the mountain.

  Reluctantly, Pettis said, “Go on.”

  She went. Like the fools all men are, we turned our backs to give her the privacy she wanted. Even her father glanced away for a moment, which was long enough. There was a blur of motion directly above the brush she was utilizing, followed by Amy’s scream.

  “Damn,” Cowboy said, starting up the rise.

  “That’s far enough.”

  Pettis stopped as a human figure stepped away from the brush, holding Amy with a long knife to her throat.

  “Let’s everybody stay where we are,” the man said. He was sun-baked, his eyes wildly alert, his voice hysterically loud.

  Pettis raised his Uzi to eye level, sighting down the barrel.

  “I don’t think you want to do that,” the man said. The blade of the knife was pressed firmly to Amy’s throat. “You shoot me, I’m likely to fall back and cut half this little girl’s head off before I hit the ground.”

  “Then let her go,” Pettis stated calmly.

  “Not likely, friend,” the man replied. He began to edge up the slope, taking Amy with him. “Truth is, I’m doing you all a favor. Saving my own skin in the bargain.”

  “You living up here alone?” Cowboy asked, matter-of-factly. He lowered his gun slightly, at the same time motioning me to move up and around the other side of the man. Slowly, I began to walk.

  The stranger eyed me nervously, brandishing the blade under Amy’s chin. “I told you to stay,” he said.

  I stopped, but Pettis motioned me on. “You’re up here alone?” he repeated.

  The man’s eyes darted back to him. “Sure I’m alone. And long as I give them what they want I’ll stay that way.”

  “Who would that be?”

  The stranger’s nervous glance went to me, back to Pettis. “Are you crazy, man? Haven’t you seen them?” He turned to me and shouted, “I said stay!”

  I kept walking, and Pettis said, “Seen who?”

  The stranger turned his attention on Pettis. “The gods, man! Didn’t you see them fall from the sky? Don’t you know they’re here to take what they want?”

  “What is it they want?” Pettis continued, reasonably. The man’s attention was split between Pettis and me. I slowly widened my circle around him, prolonging his confusion.

  “You people are crazy,” the man said. “I’m trying to do you a favor!”

  “What would that be?” Pettis asked. He had raised his gun again.

  “Save you, man! If I give them the girl, I can hide, and you can run!” His gaze swiveled wildly from Pettis to me, his hand with the hunting knife clenching and unclenching nervously.

  “Where do you hide?” Pettis inquired.

  “In the cave, man! I leave the bodies at the mouth, then run to the back and up into the crawl space.” He tittered. “I pull my feet up real tight, and they can’t get at me!” His voice rose to a shout. “And you can get away! You can run!”

  “How many have you given them?” Pettis asked calmly.

  The stranger concentrated. “There was a man the first day, and three girls the second, then an old man and his wife yesterday. I offered to save one of them, but had to kill them both—”

  I raised my shotgun. The man darted a look at me, the knife jerking away from Amy’s throat. Pettis fired.

  The stranger cried out and Amy threw herself away from him. Pettis kept firing, walking up the slope, the man’s body twitching in the sand and finally laying still.

  Amy stood trembling.

  Cowboy came and held her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. Suddenly she pushed away from him, pointing up above. “Oh, God.”

  The ridge was filled with wolves.

  “Back to the road!” Pettis commanded. Doc and Wyatt were already retreating, and we followed, Pettis letting off a burst of fire. A howl went up, followed by the now-familiar bestial feeding sounds.

  We backed to the roadway, where Doc and Wyatt were positioned with rifles balanced on the rail guard.

  We joined them as the wolves advanced. They were sluggish, but much more active than we had seen them in the daytime. Amy fired her handgun, wounding a closing wolf in the shoulder. It shrieked but continued toward us. Pettis stood and finished it off. As the beasts closest to it leaped upon the corpse, we retreated farther down the road.

  “That full Moon last night must have really charged them up,” Pettis said.

  Only three of the creatures followed. Pettis turned and fired a volley; two of them turned on the third as a bullet pierced its neck, spraying blood.

  “Keep moving,” Pettis snapped. He eyed the hills in front of us, pointing to an outcropping of rocks halfway up a small rise to our right. It hid the area behind. Any wolf adventurous enough could jump us. “They’ll go for us there.”

  “They’re going to kill us, and it’s my fault,” Amy wailed.

  “Nobody’s going to kill us,” Wyatt drawled.

  As we reached the outcropping, wolves seemed to rise out of the ground, surrounding us.

  “Maybe I should take that back,” Wyatt amended.

  At Pettis’s instruction, we formed a tight circle in the middle of the highway and began to fire. I dropped two wolves in quick succession; the first began to devour the second before a third dropped upon him. The others scored hits; Doc concentrated on picking them off when they leaped the outcropping as Cowboy had predicted.

  “To your right, Jase! To your right!” Pettis shouted.

  My shotgun was empty. I reached for two shells and discovered my pocket empty. I jammed my left hand into the other pocket and came up with a single shell, slapping it into the barrel as a wolf made his jump. Wyatt, next to me, dropped him with me. He, too, was now out of ammunition.

  The smell of blood was thick as mist. There came a momentary
halt in the wolves’ assault. But even as those around us contented themselves with picking clean the bones of their dead brethren, more wolves were making their way down the slopes toward us.

  “Move!” Pettis ordered. We backed with him through a gap, stepping over partially devoured bodies. “Run, damn it!”

  We broke into a trot. I looked at Doc and saw exertion playing across his face. The heat was brutal, drifting down at us from the sky, up at us in waves from the tarmac.

  “Move, damn it, move!”

  Doc stumbled, went down. Behind us the wolves busily fed on corpses, but one or two were stirring from their frenzy, throwing glances at us. One in particular, which held its arm in a strange position against its side, stared straight at me.

  We opened a distance of fifty yards between us and the beasts, but they could close it very quickly.

  Wyatt and I supported Doc; he was gasping, trying to speak.

  “Don’t worry, Doc,” Wyatt said. “We’ll keep an eye on you.”

  Ten yards ahead, Pettis waited impatiently.

  “We’ve got to get moving or we’ll die right here.”

  “I can…try,” Doc said.

  Cowboy brought his face very close to Doc. His eyes turned hard. “You’re not going to try, Doc—you’re going to do it. Because a lot of people at Kramer Air Force Base are counting on you—and because if you don’t, these hairy sons of bitches are going to kill you.”

  “I…” Doc nodded. “Yes. I can do it.”

  We continued on. Wyatt and I paced Doc. Pettis and his daughter pulled ahead. Pettis fired random rounds into the hills around us. After we passed under a low outcropping of rocks I noted with relief that the hills widened out and began to flatten.

  “A little more, Doc,” Wyatt said.

  The sight of the flatlands invigorated us all. Soon Doc was walking on his own, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.

  Four wolves made a tentative charge behind us. We knelt and fired. One of them went down. Two of the others immediately turned on the body, but the third, the one with the deformed arm I had noticed before, stood regarding us. Again I had the feeling it was singling me out—

  Doc groaned, and I turned to help Wyatt support him. “We’re almost out of it,” Wyatt urged.

  Doc smiled, weakly. “I’m going to make that fellow make me two cups of tea later.”

  “I’ll drink one of them myself,” Wyatt laughed.

  Ten minutes later, Cowboy called a halt. We had left the Palmera Mountains behind. Before us stretched a shimmering table of sand, low brush, and straight, heat-hazed highway.

  “One swallow of water,” Pettis ordered. As we drank he continued, “We have to make a decision. Either we pick up the pace and make it to the base before nightfall, or we spend the night here.”

  “Where?” Wyatt asked.

  “That mountain man’s cave. First, we’d have to find it, then fortify it…and even then I don’t know how good we’d be fighting them off once the Moon rises.”

  The thought of the grisly place, piles of human bones marking the stranger’s treachery, turned my stomach. The others must have felt the same. The vote was quick and unanimous.

  “We have to continue,” Doc remarked. “Anything else would be madness.”

  “You heard what I said about picking up the pace,” Pettis said sternly.

  “I heard you.”

  Pettis studied our faces. “All right. Doc, take another swallow of water. I’m going to set the pace, and we stick to it. Agreed?”

  Everyone nodded.

  Pettis turned and walked.

  His pace was grueling. After five minutes, we were all gasping. But then, gradually, we settled into a rhythm and our breathing evened out. Wyatt, deviously, began to whistle the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai. When no one joined him, he quipped, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you folks. You’d think you’d just been through some sort of catastrophe.”

  Doc smiled thinly; he had grown pale once more and was beginning to lag behind.

  As I called out for Pettis’s attention, Doc fell and didn’t get up.

  “Oh…Lord,” he gasped.

  I knelt beside him. He had turned paste-white. I tried to open his collar but he pushed me away. “Look,” he said. He held out his right arm and turned it over, showing me a long, deep red scratch.

  “Jesus, Doc,” I said.

  “When did it happen?” Pettis said evenly, suddenly standing beside me.

  Doc’s eyes were unfocused, but then cleared. “The first rush they made. I thought it…hadn’t broken the skin.” He groaned, indicating the pencil-point-thin line of blood along the length of the wound. “I suppose I was wrong.”

  “We can carry him—” Wyatt began.

  “You know damn well what’s going to happen to him,” Cowboy cut in. “All of us do.” He turned to Doc. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I…don’t want to become one of them,” he rasped.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Do you think it might be…” He paused, groaning with pain before continuing. “Do you think it might be interesting to undergo the change? I’m doing it now, Cowboy, and it’s not pleasant.” He turned to Proctor. “It’s your show now, my friend. Make sure they do it right.”

  “I’ll make sure,” Wyatt said.

  “Please make it quick, Cowboy,” Doc groaned.

  “The rest of you keep walking,” Cowboy commanded.

  “Cowboy—” I said.

  “Please go,” Doc said.

  We had gone ten yards when I heard Doc say, almost cheerfully, “I wish you would have made me that cup of tea—” and there was a burst of gunfire and then silence.

  A few moments later Cowboy had caught up with us. “Let’s go,” he said, walking past us, returning to the pace he had set.

  His voice was hard, but he couldn’t hide from us the tears that had tracked his cheeks, like water in a dry desert.

  CHAPTER 22

  A Field of Light

  Night was falling when we saw the lights.

  For the last hour it had seemed that we must have gone in the wrong direction, or that our estimate of distance had been in error, or that the desert had swallowed everything including Kramer Air Force Base. We had walked forever. The desert had begun to cool down, but the waves of heat were merely replaced by waves of anxiety, an oppressive feeling that our ascension of the next rise must produce a view of Kramer or we would all go mad. Even Cowboy had begun to show doubt and fatigue. By my own estimate, he hadn’t slept more than a few hours since I had met him. His pace had slackened. When we topped a bluff and discovered that only scrub, rocks, and sand lay before us like the Devil’s table I feared he might collapse.

  “Goddamn, it should be there by now.”

  After a pause, Wyatt said, carefully, “Maybe it is.”

  He pointed, and we all stared across the sandy tableland to the horizon. I saw nothing—and then, the desert darkened imperceptively, and the lights became visible, and Kramer Air Force Base suddenly spread itself across the valley floor below us in the distance like a wash of jewels.

  “Jesus, there it is,” I said.

  “They’ve got the generators working!” Cowboy said.

  He was gazing like a child seeing his first Christmas tree.

  “Goddamn, ole Jimmy really did it!” Wyatt shouted.

  The three of us, hypnotized by hope, began to run toward the still-distant lights. But suddenly, Pettis came to his senses, calming us to a brisk walk.

  “It’s going to get dark fast,” he said, “and we’ve still got another couple of miles to go. I suggest you keep your weapons ready.”

  We were moving through a series of low hills, which eventually rolled down to the long flat plate of desert that held Kramer Air Force Base and the miles of shuttle runway backing it.

  We walked, occasionally passing a pyramid of bones. It got dark. The stars popped into view overhead. You could feel that the night-Earth no
longer belonged to man.

  And as we topped the rise that would lead us down to the base, the night gave up the wolves to us.

  The Moon began to rise.

  They were just in front of us. When the Moon crested the horizon they let up a singular wail of love and blood lust that froze us in place, even as we could see an unattainable grail, our destination, below us.

  At that frozen spot in time and space, three sights commingled: first, the magnetic, almost blinding spotlights inside the base, which bathed the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld—the shuttle Lexington, seemingly intact and pointing ruthlessly at the sky atop a monstrous booster. Second, my eye was drawn to the Lexington’s target—the Moon itself, its evil gray light now heartily breaking the horizon beyond the base. And third, a sight that momentarily stopped my heart—there, covering the last hills we had yet to pass like a massive growth on the land and mountains, were thousands of wolves, ranked along a thick line of attack, uncountable numbers of bone piles among them, their mad howling, like that of Zulu warriors, serenading their rising homeland and the enemies they sought to annihilate.

  At their back, unnoticed, we stood transfixed, until Pettis finally woke us from our stupor.

  “Get behind the rocks,” he whispered fiercely, pulling us off the road into hiding.

  “What in hell are we going to do?” Wyatt said.

  “We’ll have to circle wide of them, or find a hole in their line farther down, away from the road.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we do what we have to.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Wyatt said dubiously.

  We backtracked a quarter mile, then climbed, unchallenged, into the hills. For once the Moon became an ally; its sharp shadow light, combined with the lights from Kramer, provided us with enough sight to avoid pitfalls.

  We followed Cowboy closely, and, after a half hour of lateral movement, he halted.

  “Let’s cut back toward the base and see what it’s like,” he said.

  As we made our way around a sharp outcropping of rock the landscape broadened before us. The road we had followed was far to the left.

  “The wolves thin out over there.” Pettis pointed to a spot directly below us, in a line with the northeast corner of the fence bordering the air base. Even from our distance I could make out twisted portions of the fence where holes had been patched or blocked with machinery.