City Under the Moon (22 page)

Another long moment passed.

“Two years and you’ve never met her? Never seen a picture?”

“I live in Ohio.”

“Could drive to New York in six hours,” said Jaguar. “I used to make that run for a booty call, girl I met on the Internet too. Didn’t know I had to pay her till I got there, but
damn
I went back for more.”

The crew laughed. Ilecko turned to him for a long moment. Lon could barely see his face, let alone read it. It probably seemed like the others were laughing at him.

“But Lon,” Mantle said, “you ain’t like
afraid
to meet her—
ow!”
Someone punched him.

“No,” he laughed. “I’m not
afraid
.”

They whisper-argued in the cab, everyone against Mantle.

Lon was startled by Ilecko’s hand on his shoulder. He finally broke his silence. “
Do not let them intimidate you,
” he said in Romanian. “
They do not understand the way of the chicken.
”

Lon’s head dropped into his hands.

“
Tell them we are close,
” Ilecko said.

“He says we’re close,” Lon called back.

Before the others could acknowledge, the wolves howled again. They were close—very close—and on every side of the carriage.

Lon’s heart was in his throat. He turned to Ilecko, who turned back to him with his typical stoic glare. No reassurance, no surprise, no concern.

Mantle cleared his throat and began to sing about bad moons. His botched melody would’ve made John Fogerty weep. Tildascow joined in, and they laughed as they fumbled the lyrics.

“
You are not like them,
” Ilecko said quietly.

“I’m not like anybody.”

“Why are you here?”

Lon thought for a moment about how to answer.
“I’m an expert.”

“An expert on chickens?”

Lon nodded.

The others laughed as Mantle took a goofy beat-box swing at the guitar solo. Some sort of a slap fight rocked the coach.

Another howl came from the right, practically in Lon’s ear. The horses flinched left, breaking the carriage to the very edge of the road. The soldiers went silent.

“Will they attack?”
Lon whimpered.

“I do not know. I am not an expert.”

Douché,
his friends at his
Magic: the Gathering
socials might say. Lon rolled his eyes at himself.
“Why haven’t they spread here like they have in America?”

“It is rare that one survives an attack.”

“It seems like most of them survive in New York.”

Ilecko contemplated that. It seemed like everything happening in New York came as a surprise to him
. “The mountains are difficult to traverse,”
he added as an afterthought,
“so the creatures do not roam far during the night.”

“Have you killed many of them?”

Ilecko either didn’t hear him or chose not to respond.

They rode in silence for a few minutes as the moon continued its game of hide and seek behind the mountains. Nearby branches rustled as something in the darkness matched their pace.

Mantle tried to start up the singing again. No one joined in.

“Ask him about Valenkov’s father,” said Tildascow.

“We have to find Zaharius Valenkov. His son is blackmailing the United States to find a cure—“

“Zaharius Valenkov is dead.”

Lon sputtered.
“Are you sure?”

“I killed him.”

Lon’s heart sank. He still hoped the werewolves could be cured, despite the thrashing he’d gotten from the CDC doctors.
“So the bloodline did not end.”

“It did. And then it began anew.”

“There was another werewolf?”

Ilecko took a long moment to answer, as if he had to give it some thought.
“It is a curse upon the family. The child inherits from the father.”

“So now Demetrius is the head of the bloodline?”

“He is.”

“Why didn’t you kill him too?”

“I had no cause. He was…”
Ilecko chose his word carefully. “
Different.”

“Different how?”

But Ilecko gave no answer. The man knew how to end a conversation.

The brush on their left waned as the path hugged a tight slope on the mountainside. They could see a village in the valley below, a small community of log cabins and utility buildings.

Ilecko brought the carriage to a stop and gazed thoughtfully into the valley. The village below was dark and eerily still. A ghost town in a haunted countryside. A fanfare of howls erupted through the forest beyond the village, as if the werewolves were staking claim.

“Are we there?” asked Mantle. The others shushed him.

“Something has gone wrong,”
Ilecko said.
“The creatures should not attack the villages.”

“Why not?”
asked Lon.

“It does not suit their master’s purpose.”

Ilecko whipped the horses, driving them harder than ever. Now he was compelled by something graver than curiosity.

“Master? They have a master?”

No answer.

“The werewolves are controlled by someone?”

No answer.

“Did they kill everyone in that village?”

No answer.

They took a sudden right turn into the forest, climbing the base of the mountain on a small road that could barely stave off the brush.

“Lon,” barked Tildascow. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know! You ask him!”

“Just relax,” she said. “Stay on him.”

“You should be on him!”

“He likes you.”

Crazy bitch, this guy doesn’t like anybody!

The forest closed in on them. Trees swiped the coach, and their branches merged formed a living tunnel, cutting off the light of the moon. The horses slowed their pace until Ilecko lit a gas lantern and held it aloft.

The road curved to the left. The horses labored as their climb steepened. The drop on their left felt infinite, like the trees were ascendant from the netherworld. Lon wished he could write that one down.
Shit!
—

The road began a sudden decline. The coach accelerated and the pull faded until it felt like they were chasing the horses. They took a dramatic swerve, there might have been a moment of freefall, and then they were violently yanked to the right. Lon held tight as his nausea returned.

They broke free of the canopy, and the light of the moon returned. They hugged the subtle curve of the mountainside until it revealed a new structure in the distance. One that took Lon’s breath away.

A castle.

A classic Gothic structure, set behind a stone curtain wall. Asymmetrical flying buttresses between the main structure and the two outer towers conjured the spooky silhouette of a cobwebbed candelabrum.

It was perched upon a hill, above the forest but still hidden in a valley between two towering mountains.

And it cut a sharp profile into the moon.

Seventeen

CDC Observation Room

3:15 p.m.

Questions only led to more questions.

First and foremost: What was happening to Melissa Kenzie
aside
from her transformations? She’d undergone an unequivocal metamorphosis, one that had nothing to do with hair and fangs. Post-reverse transformation, she’d displayed an impatient rage that seemed a stark divergence from the God-fearing mouse they’d met, an overgrown child so terrorized that she literally cried for her mommy.

Jessica watched Kenzie through the two-way mirror. Drs. Benrubi and Tsong had taken Richard’s place at the monitors. Dr. Rohr stood by the moonlight lamp’s switch. Eyeglasses were fogging from the number of staff and security packed into the observation room.

“Melissa,” Jessica said over the intercom, “we’re going to do another test. Try to relax.”

Kenzie’s eyes slinked toward Jessica’s, as if she could see her through the mirror. “Let me out of here,” she purred.

This was
not
the woman they had met yesterday.

“Soon enough. I promise.”

“I’ve lost faith, Doctor Tanner.”

Way past you, sister.

She cut the intercom and turned to Rohr at the light switch.

“Let me out of here,” Kenzie said again. This time it was a threat.

Jessica nodded. Rohr flipped the switch. The light in the containment room became lavender.

And they gasped at what happened next.

Eighteen

Five Miles East of Covasna

Transylvania

10:15 p.m. EET

The castle loomed above them like some kind of evil kingdom. Just like the village they’d passed, it appeared dark and abandoned. At the outer wall’s portcullis, both of the heavy wooden drop gates had been smashed inward.

Tildascow examined the ground by flashlight. It was flat soil, a mound of earth between the stone mountains. The two-inch coat of snow had fallen a week ago, and no one had been here since.

But there were corpses beneath the snow.

Two in the vicinity and maybe more down the road. Facing away from the castle, killed while trying to flee.

“Whose castle is this?” she asked Ilecko.

No response. He was deep in thought, still examining the drop gate.

“Guys…” said Lon. He pulled back a thick growth of lichen to reveal that someone had painted a pentagram on the wall.

Ilecko stepped backward to take it in.

“Whose castle is this?” she asked again.

By now the answer was obvious, but she had to try to open some kind of direct dialogue with Ilecko. He still couldn’t bring himself to raise his eyes above her boots. Whether it was her authority, her nationality or (most likely) her gender, she unnerved him to the point where he couldn’t even—

“Demetrius must be stopped,” he said, in muddled English that surprised the others. And then he looked her directly in the eye.

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said.

“It is not blackmail that he seeks. It is revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

He ignored her question. “Tomorrow is full moon. The werewolves begin blood rage, they become powerful. You will not stop them.’”

“We will not stop them?” Lon stuttered.

“Tomorrow they escape New York.”

Nineteen

CDC Containment Room

3:18 p.m.

Kenzie erupted with a bellowing roar. Her neck extended and her jaw exploded into a canine snout. Coarse black hair sprouted everywhere at once. Her ears curled into grey points behind her narrowing yellow eyes. Long fangs grew from her teeth. Her shoulders spread, stretching her back, while her torso tapered into the lean hindquarters of a wolf. Her feet stretched to digitigrade.

This wasn’t the werewolf they’d seen. This was a hulking monster.

The cloth restraints disintegrated like paper. The creature ripped free of the gurney.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!” Jessica screamed.

The room went dark except for the light of the monitors. The werewolf threw its tree-trunk arms, laying waste to the equipment.

“What do we do?” someone cried.

“Call security!” another yelled.

The wolf padded back and forth, eyes twinkling in the flames of the ruined machinery.

Howl
.

And then it turned toward the mirror. Jessica felt certain it was looking for her. The others backed away. Some fled the room.

The werewolf lunged into the reinforced glass. Jessica fell backward, but the glass held.

The back door flew open. Everyone fled.

The creature took a quickening lap around the gurney, gaining momentum to cannonball into the glass.

Miraculously, it still held.

The werewolf rolled to its feet and shook off the impact. It paced the length of the mirror, visibly contemplating escape.

Someone hit the lockdown switch, sealing the containment room. The light above the door flashed from green to red and alarms rang out.

A guard arrived at the door. “How long until it turns back?”

“An hour,” she said.

As soon as she spoke, the werewolf froze.

It was looking directly at her, as if the mirror were clear. The room was soundproof, the mic was off, but it had heard her. Or sensed her.

The werewolf broke their eye contact first. Its gaze tracked upward.

Toward the ventilation system.

The filtered exhaust network contained airtight pipes designed to flush the room of toxic contaminants, and seal them into a containment unit across the hall. It was sterile and secure, but she had no idea if—

The werewolf leaped, raking the vacuum-sealed ceiling with its claws. Debris came down as it landed. It shot up again and tore a gash deep enough to gain a handhold. With one more swipe, it ripped open the airshaft.

The security light flashed back to green. Two guards entered, guns drawn, loaded with silver bullets. They each fired several shots into the ceiling.
Bang Bang Bang.
The creature dropped to the floor.

“Is it dead?” asked one of the—

The monster hurtled onto the wall, loping ahead of the guards’ frantic shots, and torpedoed into them, breaking them backward against a countertop.

And the door was still open.

Jessica hit the all-page on the intercom: “All personnel, we have a code red, volatile subject—a werewolf loose in the building. Find a room and lock yourselves in, don’t come out until further notice. All security—“

Now crashing, screaming and shattering.

Jessica darted into the hallway, past the blood-streaked walls, a crumpled guard, the swaying containment room door, toward a demolished lab door. Dr. Phil Drake from USC was on the floor, his chest torn open. Harmy Smith, an intern, gurgled through her ripped throat.

The window was shattered.

INTERLUDE

Elizabeth

20 Hours Earlier

New Years’ Eve

9:50 p.m.

Elizabeth Anne Golden was having a nightmarish day.

She’d been fired from her job as a barista at Starbucks because the manager said her make-up and tattoos were making customers uncomfortable. But the fucking customers weren’t complaining—if anything, she drew in the alt crowd. No, it was the owner’s JAP daughter who wanted her gone, because she felt threatened by anyone who didn’t kiss her fake-tanned ass.

Elizabeth had a message for that bitch, and it was printed on the tiny rectangle of fabric on the back of her thong:
Fuck Right The Fuck Off
.

Everybody had something to say about how she looked. Her hair was too long, the violet streaks too brash, the pigtails too suggestive. Her mascara hid her eyes, her nose ring was too aggressive, her tattoos ruined her skin.

You’d be so pretty if you’d just let people see your face.
Just one of a million little lies people tell an ugly girl.

She
wasn’t
pretty. She was bony and pale, with a ridiculous Jewish nose, and at six-foot-two, she stuck out among the desirable girls like a mutant weed.

Fuck, she didn’t even have a nice personality.

She missed out on college because it was expensive. Resisted the synagogue because it was closed-minded. Couldn’t leave, because her mother couldn’t live alone. She had her writing, but how do you get published? No friends—even the other goths were too goddamn emo for her tastes, following manufactured trends and acting out just to get noticed by their daddy. None of them had any truth in their hearts; none of them were artists.

So what if she wanted to sleeve her arm with bleeding roses trapped in spider webs? Who was to say what she could do with her skin? It was beautiful to her, and that’s all that should matter.

Yep. Her life was a mess, her options were dwindling, and her resentment had caught fire. Her self-inflicted nickname was oh so appropriate: Elizanthrope.

The only thing she had to live for was Lon. He was her boyfriend, her best friend and her soulmate. And he seemed to have gone AWOL. They’d missed their afternoon date on iChat, which sucked because she needed to unload about Starbucks. She kept her buddy list open all evening, but he never showed. She should’ve had the nerve to shut it down and let him miss her, but kitten wanted to be stroked.

By nine, Mother had fallen asleep in the living room as usual. Elizabeth checked her oxygen tank and put a blanket over her wheelchair. Then she returned to her eternal sanctuary: her six-by-eight bedroom.

It was barely bigger than a closet, but it was pure Elizanthrope. Overlapping posters of Aleister Crowley, Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave and his first band, The Boys Next Door. A black tapestry with gold and violet stitching hung from the four corners of the ceiling. Her shelves were overflowing with pewter fantasy miniatures, each of which she’d hand-painted. Most of the lot consisted of she-devils, vampiresses, and succubi. She had a thing for powerful women. In fact, the only phallus on the shelf was her beloved vibrator, which she’d customized with rubber batwings. She left it on display because it was funny that Mom never noticed it.

Funny in Mom’s more mobile days, anyway.

Elizabeth curled up on the couch that also served as her bed. She plucked a half-smoked cigarette from her crowded ashtray and lit it with a candle. This was the only room she’d smoke in because of Mom’s oxygen tanks.

The thirteen-inch television on the floor was flashing shots of the freezing screwheads in Times Square. It’d be six hours at least before she got tired, so she surfed the Net to some Joy Division while watching the New Years’ show on mute. The chicks in that pop band—the fuck were they called?—kinda turned her on, even if their music made her want to claw off her ears.

The tourists never came past their place on Broome & Orchard, a modest corner in the oh so Jewish Lower East Side. But that didn’t stop the locals from getting pissed and making a racket. Even now some douche was kicking on the gate at Guss’ Pickles across the street. Never mind that they’d been closed for months. Go back home to your Manischewitz, no pickles for you.

Elizabeth had grown bored with her regular blogstops and chatrooms. Everyone but her was out celebrating. Maybe Lon had found a party. Maybe he’d found a girl.

On that happy note, it was time to scout for some newfangled free porn. Might as well rub one out if she had nothing better to do.

As she opened her folder of dirty bookmarks, the television caught her eye. The camera swung and focused, trying to catch a fracas in the crowd. Looked like a pretty big one.

She took a drag from her cig and turned up the volume, only to hear Ryan Seacrest regurgitating his bloody American Idiot inanity. Right back to mute.

She spent a couple of minutes gazing at goth-fetish.com, and then it was time to get the ol’ batwings for some tough love. As she sat up, the TV caught her attention again.

People were scrambling in every direction. It looked like a riot. But they weren’t angry, they were scared.

Is this real?

Ryan Seacrest was gone. All channels were showing live, frantic shots from the street.

A helicopter roared past her building, flying way too low, rattling the walls. She dug through her thick black drapes and banged on her craptastic window to loosen the seals. When she finally jerked it open—
FUCK it’s cold out
—she heard helicopters. Sirens. Cracks like gunfire.

Could it be a terrorist attack?

After a minute, she could hear the screams approaching. And then they arrived, running south on Orchard. Shrieking in terror.

Now the window wouldn’t shut. She banged on the seal until it came free, but then it slammed shut and cracked. A softball-sized shard of glass fell to the carpet and the cold air rushed through the hole.

What the fuck was going on?

Her bedroom shook again, this time on the interior side. Heavy footsteps and banging in the hallway. Muffled voices pleading.

She rushed into the living room to check the locks. They were good. And Mom was blessedly sleeping.

More banging in the hall.

The security in their building was a fucking joke. Goddamn intercom had broken months ago, and since it wasn’t getting fixed, someone had disabled the lock on the front door.

Their two deadbolts were no comfort. And their windows were entirely vulnerable. Fuck, they were easily accessible by fire escape.

“Please, please,” someone cried. The voice came muffled through her thin walls. “We have to use your phone, we have to find our friend.” They were talking to Mister Gross down the hall, through his chain. He must’ve slammed the door on them, and then they knocked on another door, this one closer. “Please! Please!”

More voices, from the stairwell.
“There’s another one right outside!”

What
was outside?

More knocking now. Even closer. Elizabeth covered her ears and stepped away from the door.

She heard a horrible crash from the street, cars into glass. And an alarm—had they broken into a store?

And then the knocking came to her door.

Oh please just go away.

The doorknob rattled.

“Please, please let me in!” a man’s voice cried. “Let me in!” The wall shook as he threw his weight against the door. “Please!”

The wall shook again. The deadbolt knobs danced in their sockets.

She had nowhere to go. Even if she could escape through the window, she couldn’t leave Mom behind. Her legs were weak, so she sat on the kitchen floor, facing the door.

She covered her ears, closed her eyes and held her breath.
Please go away.

They didn’t bang again.

But the orthodox family upstairs was at it now. Kids crying, mother and father shouting. They were always at each other’s throats, but now it was desperate. They’d outright turned on each other.

More footsteps. Screams. Helicopters rattled the building. Gunfire reports bounced off the walls.

She came to her feet and found her phone—but who the fuck to call? Didn’t matter. No service.

Light flickered from her room, and she remembered that her TV was on. She returned to more wild footage from Times Square. Streaming text across the bottom told her to stay inside and keep the door locked, and not to call 911 or their local police unless it was an absolute emergency.

The news cut to some new footage, grainy cellphone video in extreme slow motion. It was in the crowd, where a large and dark man, maybe in a policeman’s uniform, swung his gigantic hand upward. He ripped into another man’s stomach—
oh my God
—and flung him into the air.

Maybe … maybe it wasn’t a man. Or was he wearing a mask?

He slashed at the crowd, knocking them down, tossing them aside. People couldn’t get out of the way. The crowd went berserk, violence everywhere, and someone smashed into the camera.

***

By 2:30 a.m., the president had come and gone. So had most of the streetwalkers. But the helicopters persisted.

Now the reality of werewolves felt like old news.

Harry Martin kept watch from the anchor’s desk at WWOR. They were delivering instructions on how to proceed tomorrow.

Instead of celebrating with a New Year’s Day parade, the population of almost two million was supposed to leave the island in an orderly, single-file fashion. A mandatory curfew had been imposed until 9 a.m., and then everyone should remain calm and walk to their designated exit zone… blah blah blah.

What about Mom? The oxygen tanks barely gave them four hours of mobility. How hard would it be to navigate the crowd with her wheelchair?

Elizabeth only had one photograph on her wall. It was the two of them, smiling over hot dogs at Battery Park. Before the cancer. It was a sweet sentiment, one she wanted to believe in. But it was a lie.

The truth was that they hated each other. Or, at least, the hate outstretched the love. But that was the Golden way; they were fighters. They fought each other, they fought JAP Starbucks owners, they fought cancer.

Come werewolves or terrorists or the end of times, Elizabeth wasn’t going to leave her mother behind.

***

For a little more than an hour, a squad car had been positioned in the center of the intersection of Broome & Orchard. Huddled in her quilt, she watched them through her broken window. Watched them watch the darkness.

Looking for werewolves.

How many hours had she spent listening to Lon talk about them? He was so sure they were real. And now here was proof for the whole world.

Where could he be? Why couldn’t he just—

What was that?

Elizabeth held her breath.

There it was again.
Breathing
.

Deep and heavy. Sniffing. From outside.

And now a scuffle on the wall.

She stumbled from the window, slipping beneath the curtain and landing with her back on the floor.

The wind threw whistling jabs at the curtain.

The breathing returned. Frantic, hungry, like a dog trying to catch a scent.

The curtain stopped moving.

Something was right in front of the window.

She buried herself in her quilt and waited to die. Time passed, but she couldn’t track it. She grew impatient and angry, and her chest hurt from crying.

But nothing came through the window before the first rays of the sun.

***

Come morning, Elizabeth had only one thought.

Get the fuck out of this town.

The guys on TV said the moon wouldn’t set—and the danger wouldn’t pass—until after eight a.m. The curfew was in effect until nine, “
at which point everyone was to proceed in an orderly manner to their designated exit zones and calmly wait in line to be allowed off the island, where temporary housing would be available, along with a wide variety of travel options.”

The government said victims of the werewolves’ attacks could be infected and might transform at the very next moonrise. They also promised that all of the wounded would be accounted for. But the cable pundits had the balls to state the obvious.

If everyone who was injured last night was going to transform tonight…

Elizabeth spent the morning packing her black denim backpack. It was—as always—loaded with her iPod, her makeup, and the red velvet deerstalker hat she’d stitched herself.

She prided herself on being the exact opposite of most girls—that is, practical and smart. So she brought socks, underwear, water bottles, and Luna bars. And just two of her pewter figurines.

They had two of Mom’s portable oxygen tanks (“portable” meant only 20 pounds), each of which could be stretched to four hours. No choice but to lug both and hope for the best.

The good news began and ended with their location, the southeast corner of the island. According to the radio, their designated exit zone was the Manhattan Bridge to the south. It was farther than the Williamsburg Bridge, but that exit would need to handle traffic from the north.

The Chinatown YMCA would be their checkpoint. Elizabeth knew the place; she used to play in their co-ed basketball league. Sports weren’t her thing, but watching the older kids drip sweat? Huzzah.

By six a.m., Mom stirred awake to the smell of bacon, sausage and toast. Elizabeth had prepared a substantial breakfast to sustain them through what would probably be a grueling day. It was the dude on the radio’s idea, but it sounded smart.

Elizabeth ate on the move, making sure everything was locked down and switched off. She wondered if she could nail something over the broken window, then decided not to bother.

At nine on the dot, Elizabeth rolled her mother’s wheelchair across the threshold of their apartment. With the oxygen and Mom, it weighed over a hundred and fifty pounds. As her memory faded, Mom had become locked into routines. She got frightened when they were broken, and she’d ask questions on a loop.

“Where are we going? What time is it? Where are we going?”