Red Moon (10 page)

“Hey, you,” he says and raises his head to peer at the woman standing a few feet away. She wears a red kimono with a black dragon stitched into it. Hair down to her elbows. She smiles. The fountain gurgles. He lets his head drop into the groove again. “Give me a little rub, will you? I’m knotted up. Then we can get busy.”

He feels a hungry anticipation. The blood pools in his center. His erection presses uncomfortably against the table. He hears her clothes drop. He hears her breathing heavily, almost panting.

“Hey, what kind of a party’s going on without me?” He is smiling when he rises on his elbow. The pressure of the table has made his vision muddy. At first he believes this is why her nude form seems to shift, to bulge and bend, like a reflection seen on the body of a passing car. And then he blinks hard and observes between blinks the contorted posture, the lengthening teeth, the black hair bristling like quills from her skin. He feels a hole in his stomach like he used to get when small-arms fire popped in the near distance, when tracer rounds streaked through the night like blood-red comets.

Her voice is guttural when she says, “I have a message from the Resistance.”

Before he can slide off the table, she has his leg—snatching it up—her claws and then her teeth sinking into his calf. He kicks at her and she falls with a mouth full of blood. His blood. He doesn’t take the time to examine the wound, to recognize what this means, infection.

The towel slips off him when he falls off the table. His first impulse is to stupidly grab for it, cover himself—and then, equally stupid, to race for the door, call for help. But he realizes midshout that this was a planned attack and plans are rarely made alone.

She growls. It is a bestial sound. He can feel it. Feel it in his bones like when bass pours from a too-loud stereo. He has never been more vulnerable, naked and unarmed, bleeding. He doesn’t feel any pain, not yet. Only the warmth of blood running along his leg, its tackiness underfoot when he stumbles back, looking for a weapon, something to swing.

The bureau jars against his spine, preventing any further retreat. The mist from the fountain licks his back. He yanks its cord from the outlet and scoops it up and hurls it at the lycan. Its stones are like a brightly colored hail rattling the floor. The bowl arcs toward her, and she puts out her arms to catch it and it thuds against her chest and the water dampens her hair and makes it appear a rippling shadow.

She is on one side of the massage table—the padding torn through in yellow slashes—and he is on the other. He needs to get to the pile of clothes, the knife nested in it, on the opposite side of the room. He can smell her. He would recognize that smell anywhere, the smell of a lycan. Like an unwashed crotch. Supposedly set off by their hyperstimulated pituitary gland.

Her posture is hunched and her breasts dangle pendulously and her arms rake the air and her face is nearly impossible to decipher beneath all that hair. She makes a noise that sounds like a guttural string of words. His skin goes tight. She begins to climb over the table, toward him, one arm and then the other. He tries to run and nearly topples, his feet sliding across the stones.

He is to the clothes when she leaps and knocks him to the floor. For a moment they might be lovers, a tangle of limbs, breathing heavily. She is faster than him, but he is stronger. He loops an arm around her throat and drags them back against the wall. Her body bucks against his but he holds her in place. She wears his arm like a necklace. He is choking her and she claws at him, tearing away ribbons of skin from his forearm, his thighs, his ribs, wherever she can reach, while he sets his jaw against the pain and uses his free arm to seek out the knife, yanking his belt from the pile of clothes, fumbling with the leather casing.

Finally he withdraws it and unfolds the blade. In its silvery flash he catches a glimpse of his eyes, wide with fright. Then he draws the knife toward them in an arc. The woman—no, the lycan, the
thing
—tries to block the blade, swatting and tearing at him, but her strength is fading and after a few wild swings he sneaks the knife to her chest, where it catches against a rib—and grinds its way inside her.

What would have been a growl, against the pressure of his chokehold, escapes as a plaintive mewl. He stabs her again and again, so many times—
knife
,
knife
,
knife
—far more than necessary, her body limp in his lap. She doesn’t reassume her human form. Not like in the fairy tales. She dies a beast and a beast she remains.

He feels faint. The room seems so cold and her body so warm. He could fall asleep with her draped over him like this. But he doesn’t. He shoves her aside and stands with great difficulty and fights the gray wings beating at the edge of his vision. He tries not to look at his ruined arm when he retrieves the towel from the floor and makes a tourniquet of it. Roses of blood bloom immediately through the cotton.

There are no windows. There is only one way out. And only one way in. It takes him a while, but he drags the bureau against the door. He remembers how severely the old woman stared at him, and he knows Choko did not act alone. He needs help. His hand is trembling and slick with blood, but somehow he manages to retrieve the handheld from his jacket pocket and call Buffalo, telling him what happened, telling him to hurry.

P
ATRICK SPENDS
several days planning his escape—figuring out which stairs creak, spritzing the door hinges with WD-40, backing his Jeep into his parking spot and testing how easily it rolls in neutral—and then his mother tells him she’s going out of town. The National Association of Realtors. They’re having a conference in Portland this weekend.

He is so thrilled he doesn’t sigh or roll his eyes when she asks him to join her this afternoon to freshen up a house. “It will be fun,” she says. He is lying on the couch, reading the newspaper, some article about the ongoing investigation into the death of a local rancher and city council member. The ground around the corpse was a mess of coyote tracks, but the game warden claims it was highly unusual and even beyond reason to believe coyotes capable of such behavior.

The couch is leather. So is the matching armchair next to it. The living room looks like something out of a Pottery Barn catalogue. Wool carpet. Wrought-iron lamps. Dark-wooded end tables. His mother does all right.

She finishes clipping on an earring and then roughs her hair with a pick. A silver stripe flares at her left temple and curls all the way to the base of her neck, through hair that is otherwise thick and black. She hides her age well, the wrinkles fanning from her eyes caked with a layer of foundation. “So you’ll come?” she says.

“I guess.”

Her cheeks dimple when she smiles. Like his. These past few weeks, he’s spent a lot of time studying her, trying to figure out how they match up. He’s a lot like his father—that’s what people say—same hawkish nose and high forehead, same square-tipped fingers and huge hands dangling from thin wrists like shovel heads. But he belongs to them both.

She pokes him with the pick on her way out of the living room—gives his cheek a little bite with it—and he swats it away with a “Quit.”

She’s trying—he’ll give her that—trying to make him feel welcome. And he tries to reciprocate, to make himself available, answering her incessant questions, sitting at the kitchen table to do his homework, joining her when she watches the stupid television show about the horny doctors.

He’s not looking for drama. His life needs the volume turned down, not up. He knows a lot of crybabies in his situation would probably lock themselves in their rooms and eventually throw a damp-eyed fit about how Mommy abandoned them. Whenever he feels tense and ready to shatter a dish against the wall, he remembers his father, who demanded he not feel sorry for himself.

Still, there are little things that bother him. The way she uses her hands when she speaks, pointing and pinching and swinging and flapping. The way she’s always losing lids—the milk, the mustard, the oatmeal—everything in the house uncapped. The way she programs the thermostat. All of August she kept the air-
conditioning
at seventy-four—and now that the weather has turned cold she keeps the heat at sixty-seven. “Jesus,” he says. “Wouldn’t it make sense to negotiate between the seasons, keep it at seventy year-round?”

And she’s a bit of a freak when it comes to messes. She’ll pull a shirt right off him if it’s wrinkled. She’ll scoop up a dish the moment he drops it on the counter and rinse it off to set in the dishwasher. And he could tell, when she put down the money on the used Jeep, how disgusted she was by it. “Are you sure?” she said, too many times, pointing out the other cars in the lot, all of them sedans, only going along with his insistence on the run-down Wrangler because she would do anything right then to make him happy.

She drives a white Camry so clean the sky streams across its hood like water. The interior still smells new, despite the car being a few years old, so different from his father’s pickup, with the dust coughing from the vents and the French fries moldering under the seats. Before they left, she grabbed a vented carrier from the garage and set it in the backseat. Inside sits a calico cat that paws and bites at the caged door and hisses when Patrick turns around. “What’s with the cat?” he says, and his mother says, “It’s for a friend. They were giving them away at the gas station.”

They drive through Old Mountain, a place that has transformed from mill town to luxury outpost for Californians looking for a second home or a place to retire. His mother tells him they came for the skiing, the fly-fishing and mountain biking and horseback riding. “Fifteen years ago, when I first moved here,” she says, “fifteen thousand people. Now? Two hundred fifty thousand in the metro.” Making it one of the fastest-growing communities in the country and creating fault-line abrasion between the old and the new.

The mill is long gone, the industrial district replaced by condos, organic coffeehouses, boutique clothing stores, a brickwork river walk. There are few intersections, everything a roundabout that makes Patrick feel dizzy and lost.

She points out the section of town where the lycans used to live—before the Struggle, when lycan segregation was mandatory in housing, schools, bathrooms, restaurants—a collection of quaint one-story bungalows that now, his mother says, cost three hundred thousand a pop.

The road inclines as they drive up the side of a butte—into a neighborhood that is a carbon copy of his mother’s. These faux-rustic developments are all over town, as far as Patrick can tell, many with golf courses spilling greenly through them. They have names like Elk Ridge and Bear Hollow, and every house seems to come with a river-rock chimney and rough-hewn pine pillars flanking the front porch.

The sky is a pale and depthless blue. A gusty September breeze sends leaves skittering across lawns, and one of them catches on Patrick’s shoe—a round leaf, as gold as a coin, as though money indeed grows on trees here—when he steps out of the car next to the Century 21 sign staked in the front yard.

From the car trunk, his mother retrieves a broom, a Dirt Devil, and a paper bag full of cleaning supplies. They roll down the windows for the cat.

The family moved out last week. She vacuums the footprints from the carpet, massages away the divots from where tables and couches stood. She Windexes the fingerprints smeared across the storm door and arranges scented candles throughout the house to light before the showing. She clips flowers from the garden and fits them in a short vase on the kitchen island. He yanks the cheatgrass flaming up between the four cement squares of the driveway. He sweeps the stone entryway, the tile bathrooms, the oil-spotted garage. He lifts a window and clambers across the roof and cleans out the pine needles clogging the gutters.

When they finish, an hour later, he asks if she does this for every house and she says she does, more or less. He asks if it really makes that big of a difference, a candle sputtering in the bathroom, and she says absolutely. “Because appearances matter.” She snaps her seat belt into place and readjusts the mirror and feathers her hair with her fingers. “That’s the world we live in.”

From the day Chase took the oath of office, he refused police escorts. They cost taxpayers too much, thirty-eight million in California the previous year. Besides, he claimed, he could protect himself. For the past month, ever since Chase began to regularly appear on the lecture and talk-show circuit, Augustus forced a compromise and hired a private security detail from Lazer Ltd., mostly thick-necked, thin-waisted ex-military. Chase calls them babysitters and refuses their protection except during speaking engagements. Augustus tries to get him to reconsider, telling him the worst can happen when you least expect it.

The worst has happened. Four men, all wearing tracksuits, pick up Augustus in a black Chevy Suburban and drive at a perilous speed to the Kazumi Day Spa, honking their way through red lights, screeching their way around corners. It’s an unlisted address, but Augustus knows the way and directs them from the backseat—telling them to hurry, goddammit,
hurry
—even as he leans into a turn and braces an arm against the window to keep his balance.

They find the front door locked and use a metal battering ram to splinter it from its hinges. One man remains posted at the entrance while the others, their Glocks unholstered, charge inside. They give the all clear and Augustus walks into the dim entryway. The lights are off, the hallways and rooms empty—except for one barricaded door. They shove at it and a crack of orange light appears and only then does Augustus tell them, “
Stop
.”

The men step away and wait for him to tell them what to do. “Stay here,” he says and shoulders past them and puts all of his weight against the door until the bureau slides away and allows him entrance. He hurries the door closed before the men can spot Chase, curled up on the floor—dizzy and naked and shivering from blood loss, but alive.

There is blood smeared across the wall and soaked into the carpet that squelches underfoot. “I’m here,” Augustus says, not daring to touch his friend, not knowing how long the disease can live once exposed to the air.

He toes the slumped body of the transformed lycan. Her hair, tacky with blood, has the look of seaweed plastered across the beach at low tide. “Bitch,” he says, “you really fucked things up.” The governor attacked in a whorehouse. Half-dead and likely infected. His political career finished. Augustus brings back his foot and considers kicking her face but doesn’t, not wanting to dirty his shoe.

Instead he covers her body with towels so that the others won’t see her. Red splotches soak through immediately. He pulls a terry-cloth robe off a hook and tucks it around Chase. No one can know about this or everything will be ruined. There is only one choice. He opens the door and tells the men to get a makeshift stretcher for Chase, and then, once they get him to the car, “Burn the place. Burn it to the ground.”

Patrick’s mother needs to make a stop on the way home. Just for a minute. To drop something off. “The cat,” she says. “I hope that’s all right.”

They drive past several car dealerships, where dozens of American flags snap in the breeze, and past the dump, where crows and seagulls darken the sky, and here, his mother says, pointing to an abandoned whitewashed cinder-block building, is the old school where the lycan children went. Its windows are thorned with broken glass, its front door yawns open, and a pine tree twists through its roof.

Another mile and they turn off into Juniper Creek, a wooded neighborhood on the outskirts of town, every driveway curling away from the road into an acre lot. Browned pine needles rain down on the windshield. Patrick can see the house, twenty yards ahead, a ranch home with a lava-rock exterior that makes it appear as though it is rising out of the ground.

Then his attention is lost to movement all around them. Out of the bushes, from behind trees and under the front porch, come dogs. More than a dozen of them. They kick up dust when they tear toward the car. Among the assorted mutts, Patrick spots a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, and a wiener dog. They bark furiously, surrounding the car, pacing it as it crawls up the driveway.

His mother does not seem to notice them, humming along with the radio. She shifts into park, kills the engine, and swings open her door before Patrick can tell her, “No!”

The barking ceases, replaced by whimpers and soft cries for attention. His mother speaks to them in baby talk and ruffles their ears and pats their backs.

“Who lives here?” Patrick says.

“A friend.”

She doesn’t invite him to join her, doesn’t ask for his help with the carrier she removes from the backseat. “Back in a flash,” she says when she starts toward the house, not bothering to nudge a hip against the driver’s-side door and close it. Some of the dogs follow her, darting in front of her, begging for her attention, all tongues and tails—excited by the scent of the cat—and others remain with the car, including the Rottweiler, who observes Patrick from the open door, panting, licking its chops.

A minute passes before Patrick says, “Good dog?” and the Rottweiler considers this encouragement enough to leap onto the front seat, its face inches from his. All Patrick can focus on is its mouth. Its breath smells like old hamburger. Its gums are a spotted black, its teeth the size of his thumbs.

He does not breathe when he raises his hand, so slowly, to pet the dog. It sniffs his hand once, gives him a lick, then nudges—with its cold, damp nose—his hand upward for a scratch behind the ears.

It isn’t long before Patrick stands outside the car with his arm cocked and a stick in his hand. The dogs surround him, their eyes on the stick. “Ready?” he says, and they yap and their paws drum the ground. He hurls the stick and it flies end over end into the woods and the dogs go ripping away, their paws kicking the ground hard enough that Patrick can feel the tremor in his chest like a furious heartbeat. A moment later the German shepherd appears, smiling around the stick, the rest of the pack trailing behind.

Patrick throws the stick, now damp with slobber and dented with tooth marks, a good twenty times. The dachshund grows tired and stays behind after the last toss, and Patrick picks the dog up and cradles it in his arms. He can’t believe he felt afraid, a few minutes ago, when they first drove up. The dachshund licks him, a tongue worming from a snout run through with white hairs. Harmless. But when Patrick peels back the skin, he exposes the jagged line of teeth hidden inside this tiny old dog.

At that moment the front door swings open and his mother starts down the porch midconversation. “Which will be good, I think,” she says. “So I’ll see you soon.”

A man stands in the doorway, watching them. He wears a dress shirt tucked into khakis. He is tall and eerily lean and bald except for a silver horseshoe of hair. He gives an almost imperceptible nod, a slight dip of his chin, which Patrick does not return.

Chase shivers in and out of consciousness. His skin is as pale as the bone peeking out of his shredded arm. Every heartbeat brings an electric surge of pain. He is lying on a blue tarp, he realizes. A blue tarp in a white room. Not a hospital; they can’t risk a hospital. His head rolls to the side and the tarp pops beneath him and he recognizes the couch against the wall, the tacky white leather couch, as Buffalo’s. His living room.