City Under the Moon (14 page)

In fact, the
whatever it was
was…changing.

Where a wolf fell was now a man. A cop.

“Hold on—we’ll get help!” he shouted. “Dispatch, we have a ten double zero at Times Square. Request ambulance immediately!” No immediate response.

Jesus, had he just shot a cop?

“Dispatch, are you there? Request—“

Now screams from behind. He twisted in his horse’s saddle to find two new creatures loping through the crowd at jungle cat velocity, mowing down civilians in their path.

And zeroing in on him.

His mount bucked, but it was too late. The creatures shot from the ground, and then Orlandi felt his horse’s insides rupture from the impact as he tumbled through the air.

Dazed and numb, Orlandi stirred to sounds of ravenous chewing. He was trapped in the saddle, his leg broken underneath his horse. He pulled at its mane, got no response. But it couldn’t be dead, it was trembling.

No. It
was
dead. And something was tearing at its stomach.

He couldn’t get his head up to see what was happening and he couldn’t find the air to call out. And none of the thousands of people around him were coming to his aid.

One of the creatures crested the horse’s belly. It was smaller, squeakier than the last one, but no less threatening. Blood dripped from its teeth, splattering on the horse’s ribcage. Orlandi closed his eyes as it closed in on him. He could smell its hot, salty breath—

Two cracks in the air and the monster jerked from a one-two punch. A second later, another shot sizzled and the second creature rolled from behind the horse’s stomach.

The animals silently shriveled. Their fur retreated and their faces softened and they became human children. Just toddlers.

Orlandi covered his eyes and cried into his elbow.

Twelve

CDC Observation Room

10:21 p.m.

Twenty-three minutes after moonrise in New York, after the story had already broken across the major networks, the glimmering blue light of the moon dawned over the horizon of Atlanta.

Jessica Tanner watched Melissa Kenzie roar awake from a dead sleep. The fangs pushed through her gums, thick hair sprouted anew, and her hands twisted into claws as she thrashed at her bonds.

This transmutation was at odds with what they understood to be fundamental pillars of biology and virology. Or, at least, what they
thought
they understood. How could a virus hijack DNA to such an extent that it reassigned its host’s
species?

It just couldn’t be possible, no matter how real it was.

There hadn’t been enough time to properly interview Kenzie between the morning inducement and the moon’s rise. Post-antithetical transformation, she’d remained in a feverish state, exhausted and uncommunicative. They didn’t want to risk taxing her heart with methamphetamines, so their questions would have to wait until morning.

But waiting wouldn’t do anymore, not with those creatures loose in Times Square. The exposure rate tonight would be astronomical.

“DNA polymerase,” Richard hypothesized, whispering to himself as they watched a tape of the new transformation repeat in slow motion. “The virus catalyzes change in the DNA. It doesn’t lose the original template, so moonlight must trigger it to synthesize and overlay a new strand.”

Jessica stood beside him, but she wasn’t watching the tape. She had a question for her husband, and she was fearful of his reaction.

He gasped as he thought of another possibility. “Or... epigenetics! Trans-species polymorphism. It just flips a switch in evolution.” He smiled like he was sizing up a Playboy spread. “God, I can’t wait to get under the hood of this thing.”

“Richard,” she began, steeling herself, “we need those SCORN files from the DHS. Can you get to anyone over there?”

Some years ago, one of Jessica’s predecessors claimed to have “accidentally” seen a Top Secret file labeled as part of a database called Project SCORN. This document, which contained data on mutated strains of smallpox, was intended for the Biochem Division of Homeland Security Science and Technology, a branch of the DHS and a mysterious cousin to USAMRIID.

Theoretically, Project SCORN contained a wide variety of information about experimental biological and chemical testing that the CDC and other facilities were forbidden to pursue—everything from the obvious hot-button issues like stem cell research to absurd sci-fi surgeries and, very likely, exploratory mutagenics. The name had become legend among the CDC community and synonymous with government obfuscation.

Richard frowned. “SCORN? What are you talking about?”

“You know what SCORN is. If they have something on silver, we need to know. There’s no time to waste.”

There were myriad conspiracy theories about magical cure-alls suppressed by the government. The most common thread between them was silver. She’d done post-grad research on one herself: Internet crackpots had swarmed around a mythical compound called
Tetrasilver Tetroxide,
which was supposed to electrify the blood and destroy AIDS and HIV pathogens. A 1997 US patent on the process was granted to an Israeli rabbi who also claimed to have invented a nuclear submarine reactor and a battery for credit cards. Of course, an issued patent is no endorsement that a process actually works; you could patent a method for time travel using a garden rake if you submitted all of the forms properly (and if the rake’s design didn’t infringe on someone else’s patent). Meanwhile, alt-med nuts were overdosing on silver, turning their skin Smurf blue from argyria and going on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

But there was plenty of smoke. Maybe that meant fire.

“If the DHS or USAMRIID or anyone has something helpful, they’ll bring it to us,” Richard assured her, running his hand through her hair. “Contrary to what you insist on believing, they’re in the same fight we are.”

Richard had always been notoriously quiet about SCORN and protective of the military, and the truth was it bugged the hell out of her. It reminded her of Alan Hoxie’s warning that Richard had been planted in the CDC to feed information to USAMRIID.

Keeping a secret like SCORN didn’t necessarily imply nefarious intent; secrecy was part of a government scientist’s job. But as his wife, she found secrets frightening. And if he could keep
one
…

She backed away from his caress, trying to sound authoritative. “Were they experimenting with silver while you were at USAMRIID?”

“Of course, Jessica. They’re experimenting with
everything
. That’s how research works. But they don’t have a magic tonic that cures everything.” He smiled, trying yet again to charm away her doubt. “Someday you’re going to have to believe in me, Jess.”

Thirteen

26 Federal Plaza

FBI Research Library

10:24 p.m.

Tildascow had the name from the flight manifest.

And exactly nothing else.

The fuck were they doing for security in Romania? And how did this shit fly with Homeland Security? No police record, no fingerprints, no travel history. The passport was issued early in 2008, before Romania began using the new ones with biometric ID chips. The address had no street number, no zip code. Birth date listed as January 1, 1970, which screamed generic bullshit. The US Embassy said the Romanian Ministry of Interior had no records of land ownership, taxes, or utilities. No birth certificate, no hospital records.

Just a name.

Discord spread through the room. The research assistants gathered around a flat-screen television. As Tildascow approached, Charlie yanked the cord on the courtesy headphones. The audio went loud.

“—reports of gunshots, both sniper units and law enforcement officers on the street. There are dozens of bodies sprawled through Times Square. As we can see from this overhead shot—“

The reporter was shouting over a helicopter shot of mass mayhem in Times Square. Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were trapped amid a violent mass exodus. Cleared areas were littered with injured or dead. Dozens, maybe hundreds.

The reporter’s tone changed: “This just— They’re telling me we have video from the ground. We have video from the ground, and I’ve been told to advise you to excuse your children from the room. This is graphic footage from just moments ago in Times Square.”

The overhead gave way to a haphazard point of view from the CNN platform just above the street. Revelers chaotically fleeing Times Square. Screams. Gunshots. Sirens. Trampling.

Suddenly a closer, high-pitched scream erupted off-screen, and the cameraman jolt-panned right to find a werewolf in mid-leap, claws extended and fangs glimmering—

The picture bounced and fuzzed before landing sideways, allowing them to see the cameraman’s lower body jerk as the monster tore him apart.

Some of the researchers shielded their eyes. Others gasped.

But Tildascow saw something else.

As CNN cut back to Wolf Blitzer in their studio, Tildascow scoured the control board for a rewind button.

“No tape here,” Charlie said, already on the move. “Downstairs.”

They bolted to the stairwell.

The watch center on the eighteenth floor was Charlie’s home base. His passkey granted access to a media room where small monitors ran all of the news stations and major networks. He brought up CNN on a large monitor and pointed Tildascow toward a jog wheel.

She zipped backward through in-studio reaction shots until she reached the tail end of the live footage from Times Square. There was that cameraman taking the mauling.

And there, in the last twenty frames, she found him.

He turned toward the camera, shifting in his catlike manner. Trying to get himself seen—she was sure of it—but they’d cut away. And there was his shirt, emblazoned with his message: “find a cure.”

“Hello you,” she muttered.

“Mm-hmm,” Charlie said.

He was the only stillness in the mayhem. A leaf settled amid a hurricane.

Demetrius Valenkov.

PART FOUR

One

Brianna Tildascow understood the “normal” world, where people lived and loved and worked and played, but it wasn’t a place for her. Her job was to watch from the outside, appraising the “normal” people with a wistful smile of jealousy and predation.

Could she hurt them? Sure. Possibly.
Probably
. But she suppressed those urges.

Her friends at DARPA knew that. There had to be a scope trained on her somewhere, or they were even more provincial than she’d imagined. In the meantime, they’d forged her into exactly what they wanted: an executioner’s sword, stripped and sharpened until everything that remained had lethal purpose.

Brianna was born the first time on August 4, 1976, in lower-middle-class West Virginia. Her mother was a flower in full bloom, the kind of woman who struck poets speechless. Wild blond curls and eyes so blue they made you thirsty.

She was a chosen one, that Lucy Hennessy was, blessed with vigor and grace and infinitely generous love. And her voice… Her voice was a warm quilt.

She was the town’s perfect child. Everyone had high expectations for her future. But she wasn’t interested in college, and money wasn’t important to her. When high school ended, she took up shop at a local coffee house, strumming her guitar and singing her lullabies. Her admirers multiplied and her performances grew crowded, but she turned down invitations from Nashville and LA.
No need to complicate things,
she’d say.

They always thought her unpredictable, but Lucy was never more a surprise than when she chose Mark Tildascow, a flannel-clad bear with dark scruff and a ubiquitous baseball cap. He was a
plumber
of all things—so embarrassingly out of place in Lucy’s ethereal glow. How could she have chosen
him?

It was a cold November evening, threatening to snow. Mark had been called to fix the toilet in The Hazel’s Nut, a mom-and-pop coffee shop at Third and Laine (it turned into a video rental store soon after, but they always pointed it out to Brianna). Lucy had just arrived for her performance. They met by chance at the counter. They didn’t have a thing in common; in fact he thought she was just being polite by laughing at his stupid jokes. She touched his hand and said goodbye. No—she
sang
goodbye. Lucy’s voice always sounded like music.

Try as he might, Mark couldn’t shake her laugh. He drove 25 miles before he got the courage to turn around. He pushed his rickety van (named Cindy after Ms. Crawford) past a hundred miles an hour to make sure he didn’t miss her.

Not three miles from the shop, Cindy skidded out on a bend. She went sideways over the curb and got stuck in the snow.

This was the part of the story where her mother took great delight in mentioning that Mark had painted “Chilled? Has Plow!” beneath “Tildascow” on the side of his van, to let people know how to pronounce his name. And yet, he had no plow. This was an area where folks needed snow plowed a couple of times a year, so his ad in the yellow pages led to quite a few disgruntled callers. Imagine their satisfaction at seeing the “has plow guy with no plow” stuck in the snow.

So, in the middle of what was becoming a blizzard, Mark trudged half a mile and back to call a tow truck. And anyway, did he really think that girl would go out with him? She belonged with a guy in a suit. Or hell, a guy who
owned
a suit. Just when he decided that turning back was the stupidest thing he’d ever done, headlights appeared over a dip in the road. He was shivering so hard that he almost couldn’t wave down the tow truck.

Except it wasn’t the tow truck.

After that night, it took Mark and Lucy all of two weeks to get married at City Hall. A few years later Brianna came along and they blissfully re-discovered the world through her eyes.

Mark Tildascow and Lucy Hennessy made a perfect life together. No one they knew woulda thunk it. That Lucy was perfect, all right. And a perfect mystery.

But not to Brianna. Her mother’s beauty was in her simplicity, and in Mark she saw a genuinely good heart, loyal and honest and not afraid to love. In his way, a way no one but Lucy could have seen, he was perfect too. He worked hard, played fair, and would have died for his family.

Tildascow was born again on June 10
th
, 1992, the humid night of her high school’s sophomore dance. Her escort was Gary Holm, her boyfriend of three months. Sweet, nervous Gary was hoping with all of his teenage might that she would have sex with him afterward.

“Will we or won’t we” was a big topic of conversation among all the girls, but Brianna simply hadn’t made up her mind. It helped that her mother vaguely approved of Gary. She said he had “a good heart in there, but he was easily distracted.”

Easily distracted.
It was the best Lucy could do to muster an insult.

After the dance, Brianna and Gary joined their friends in a party limo. They ended up at a secluded overlook, where each couple left the car to find some privacy in the woods. Gary was too nervous to consummate the night, but she let him put his hand under her dress as a consolation prize. What he managed to accomplish down there wasn’t altogether terrible.

The partiers ate breakfast at a decrepit Denny’s before watching the sunrise from atop Wissihickon Plateau. Her friend Meg had done the deed, and all she could talk about was the mind-shattering ramifications of those forty seconds. She was so impressed that she failed to notice when her boyfriend got the Denny’s waitress’ phone number.

Brianna was happy with the way the evening had unfolded. She thought her mother would approve. The less her father knew, the better.

The morning dew hadn’t dried when the limo dropped her off. It rolled away with a victorious beep, and she walked the gravel path toward the modest Tildascow family home, carrying her strappy shoes with their broken heels.

All the while, she wondered why the front door was open.

It was a hundred or so feet from the fence to the porch. Her father always said that someday he’d fill their massive yard with a swimming pool, but really it was a poop playground for their mutt, Chester.

She never saw Chester again.

She found footprints on the beige cement, damp and reddish, taking clearer shape as she approached the house. Leaving while she was coming. The red had collected in the etching they’d carved when the cement was laid in 1982.

Mom + Dad + Brianna ‘82

It was hot and damp inside, and eerily still. The room tone was mute.

“Mom?”

Blood everywhere. Splattered in every direction, ruining her mother’s oil paintings and coating the windows, turning the sunlight a furious red.

How could there even be so much?

“Mom?” she cried. “Mom! Mom!”

Her eyes fell on a boot sticking out from behind the couch. Their hideous orange couch where she used to hide her extra Oreos.

“Dad?”

He was lying crooked on the floor, his arms curled under his shoulders and his cheek pressed into the blood-soaked carpet. His glazed eyes stared off into nowhere.

She screamed for her daddy, but he was never going to answer again.

Brianna turned toward the kitchen, maybe thinking about the phone, and found her mother lying on the table. Her throat had been cut. The ceiling was red from the spray of her blood. Her legs were spread, her yellow sundress ripped and stained. Her arms dangled over the edge of the table, still elegant even as they dripped the last of her life.

She looked back at her daughter with those infinitely blue eyes, mouth open like she was about to say something.

Brianna ran for the kitchen phone, squelching in the drowned carpet, and fought the rotary dial, forcing it to recoil quicker, quicker, and argued with her mother.
You’ll be okay, Mom. You’ll be okay.

She begged the police to hurry.
Don’t let my mother die.

Mom’s chef’s knife sat on the counter, coated thick in drying blood. Brianna began to realize what it had done. It had cut their apple pies, their lasagna, their fresh watermelon—and now her parents’ throats.

The police arrived, and the ambulance; but no matter how much she demanded, they wouldn’t help her parents. Instead, they rushed
her
to the hospital. But she wasn’t hurt. They gave her counseling, but she wasn’t crazy. They brought her food, but she wasn’t hungry. They asked her questions, but she had no answers.

All she knew was this: Whatever was before was now over.

She became a ward of the state. In the months that followed, she was taken from her school. She lost touch with her friends. There was some sort of underage asylum/halfway house for the first few months, then an orphanage. New people, new places, even new clothes. Every part of her old life had been cut away by Mom’s chef’s knife.

One day an orphanage counselor called Brianna into her office. The elderly, bug-eyed woman told her to sit down, and offered her a caramel. When it was clear that Brianna wasn’t interested in pleasantries, the counselor asked her if she wanted to hear about what happened to her parents. Some West Virginia newspaper had an article wrapping up the story.

“It would be okay if you don’t,” the counselor said, her voice rising with selfish hope. “Sometimes these things are better left unsaid.”

Brianna nodded and stayed silent while the counselor put on her glasses and silently read the opening paragraph.

“Three drug addicts broke into your house,” she said, paraphrasing. “They were on a binge and they needed money.”

She read ahead. When she spoke again, her voice shattered the silence.

“They tied your mother down, and one stayed with her while the other two took your father to an ATM. He withdrew cash and gave it to them, and then they returned to your home,” she said, glancing over her glasses to read Brianna’s empty expression. She read ahead, looking for some kind of positive thought, some sort of consolation prize that was not there.

Brianna Tildascow didn’t have the edge to survive in a merciless orphanage. The curly golden hair she shared with her mother had lost its sheen in the long stretches between showers. Their milky skin grew hard and the luster of their blue eyes dimmed. Honestly, it was a relief to look in the mirror and see someone else.

Her father had a $25,000 life insurance policy, something from some plumbers’ union, but she never saw a cent. There were costs for a funeral she didn’t attend, reparations for debt she didn’t understand, taxes for things she’d never bought.

She was alone and terrified. But she could still hear her mother as she went to sleep at night, that honey-coated voice reminding her not to be easily distracted.

And so she learned.

First it was button-pushing.

She started with the other kids in the orphanage. Sex worked, gossip less so, but their insecurities were always the sweet spot. Manipulating their emotions was like changing radio stations—she kept going till the song fit her mood. Thinking beyond surface interactions, it was easy to adjust their personalities to suit her needs, or to torpedo their spirits altogether and cast a new mold in which they were beholden to her approval. Soon she moved on to the matrons—
it couldn’t be that easy, right? Not with adults?
But it was even
easier
, because their souls had been so crushed. She danced between their complexes with the same grace as her mother strummed her guitar.

Then she learned to fight.

Her strength was unreliable, so she studied methods of shutting down the human machine. She learned to analyze quickly, adjust on the fly, and use unconventional weapons. Environmental awareness. Pain tolerance. Damage control.

She shaved her mother’s blond hair because it was too easy to grab. Clipped her fancy nails short and wore scuffed, sharp rings on her fingers. No earrings. No dresses; they invited rape.

She understood the intimidation game. One display of sheer brutality, and her enemies’ courage would wither. But prevention wasn’t interesting; she sought ignition. One night a teenage boy pushed the issue. When he bent down to unfasten her jeans, she fractured his skull with her knee.

A trail of broken victims accumulated in her wake, and so did days spent in juvie. She was on the verge of eighteen and running out of pit stops before real prison. They appointed her a special counselor for repeat offenders.

He was “Aaron Burke from upstate Michigan” (that’s how he’d always introduce himself), and he was 35 years her senior. Doughy and soft and altruistic as they came, Aaron was woefully unequipped for both of his chosen professions: the army, then juvie counseling.

But, like her father, he had a good heart.

It took some time, but Aaron’s awkward jokes and goofy nerves chilled her rage. He liked stupid action movies where nobody fought properly and even stupider romantic comedies where nobody thought properly. His voice was calm, his presence was relaxing, and his bed was safe.

The affair began not from a particular attraction, but because she wanted to make him feel special. His gracelessness had kept him from marriage, maybe from dating at all, and theirs might have been the affair of his life. She made the most of their relationship, even allowing a couple of her calluses to soften, but she could never convince Aaron that she loved him. Because she didn’t.

In fact, she couldn’t feel anything.

She
knew
things—Aaron was attracted to her; Aaron needed to be reassured; Aaron was concerned for her future—but she never felt anything. Not for Aaron, not for the kid whose skull she’d broken, not when that counselor told her what had happened to her parents.

It became a growing obsession with Aaron that she should enter the military. They’d turned his life around, he said, and they’d do the same for her.

This new generation of the military has wisely learned to become more accepting of women and all of their multifaceted talents, and you’ll find a place to make the most of the unique skill set you’ve developed.
He could deliver a speech to ask for a club sandwich.

It wasn’t all self-sacrificing on his part. He felt guilty about their age disparity. He worried that he was keeping her from a normal life and normal family.
Normal
.