Red Moon (16 page)

T
HE TALL MAN
climbs out of his Lincoln Town Car, his beltline nearly parallel with the roof of the car. He wears a long-sleeve button-down wrinkled from the long drive. His jacket is folded neatly over the passenger seat, and he pulls it out now and meticulously brushes the lint off it before sliding one arm and then the other into its sleeves. His head is hairless, not because he shaves his head clean every morning, but because he has been burned terribly. His skin has the wrinkly gloss of chewed bubblegum. It isn’t clear where his lips begin and end. His dark eyes appear lidless. His nose is small and upturned and from a distance appears like no nose at all, slitted like a skull.

Three police cruisers, a Forest Service Bronco, and a forensics van are parked nearby, in a parking lot corralled by a split-rail fence. A sign hangs from a post—a varnished block of wood with the letters carved out of it—Blood Bath Hot Springs. A rime of snow coats the letters.

The half-mile trail takes him no time to walk, his long legs scissoring quickly, his black wing tips dusted red when the pines open up into a rocky clearing busy with police. Tendrils of steam come off the springs as if something beneath their surface is alive and breathing. The smell of sulfur, like eggs on their way to going bad, is such that more than a few men have their shirts tented over their noses.

They don’t have enough tape to cordon off the crime scene. So there is a strip of black and yellow hanging across the trailhead. Most would duck under it, but the Tall Man steps over. A goateed man in a black North Face fleece approaches him with a question on his face he doesn’t have to ask. The Tall Man already has his identification out, and the goateed man nods at it and says, “Never seen you before.”

“You wouldn’t have.” His voice is baritone, every word he speaks cleanly enunciated.

The policeman is studying the Tall Man, arrested by the sight of him. He eventually says his name is Don and identifies himself as a sheriff’s deputy. He pulls out a pack of Juicy Fruit and pops a piece in his mouth and jaws at it. “You come from the office in Portland or Salem?”

“Neither.”

The deputy chews the gum another moment. “All right. Be a mysterious asshole. Let me know what you need to know.”

The bodies are several days’ dead. They would have been perfectly preserved except for the heat of the springs. As is, their skin is blackened and occasionally split red from swelling, like a hot dog left too long on the grill. The severed head of an old man, his mouth gaping open, peers at the Tall Man from the top of a spiked boulder. Here is a body of a woman splayed like an X, her belly hollowed out, a brown-and-yellow tangle of intestines piled nearby.

Policemen in blue Windbreakers snap photos. The flashes explode. The ground is uneven with red blistery rocks that their boots thud against often and that send them stumbling forward. Except for the Tall Man, who walks slowly and cleanly around the springs, stepping over bodies, balancing on the rocks, sometimes turning in a circle to look thoughtfully off into the woods.

He spots something in the red puddle of spring water. A naked body, boiled and egg white, floating belly-up. Don stands nearby, talking into a handheld, and when he ends the conversation, he looks at the Tall Man looking at the body. “Lycans.”

“I am aware.”

“What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking about how, when I was in college, I thought I was going to be a volcanologist. Isn’t that a funny thing to want to be? There is something about them, volcanoes, that has always appealed to me. I have stood at the smoking rim of Saint Helens and flown a helicopter over Kilauea and stared down into its terrible orange eye. In the end, I didn’t have the head for chemistry and physics, but I took enough classes and read enough books to know that eruption is about force and time.” He visors his eyes with his hand and looks at the cloud-shrouded mountains above them. “Did you know that the Three Sisters, even though they are quiescent, have magmatic activity beneath them? Did you know that their elevation changes, sometimes by several inches, every year? They will erupt again, and this very place we are presently standing in will be a bright-red sea. It is only a matter of time.”

The head of the body is sunken, barely visible in the red murkiness, but when the Tall Man dips his foot into the spring, as if testing the water, to toe the body, it bobs upward and the face gapes back at him, looking like a pencil drawing smeared over by wet fingers.

“Force and time.”

N
EAL DESAI’S DAUGHTER
is having one of her dark days. That’s what his wife tells him over the phone, asking him to come home early if he can. His daughter needs him. “Yes,” he says. “Of course.” But then his lab work distracts him and the next time he glances at the clock it is seven thirty. There are no windows here. Hours often pass without him lifting his head from a microscope or computer. Another missed meal. Another night coming home to an upset wife, her face hidden behind a novel or focused on the TV turned up too loud.

He works in the Pacific Northwest Regional Biocontainment Laboratory in the Infectious Disease Research Center. They are part of the University of Oregon, but located outside Eugene, a collection of mostly windowless concrete buildings surrounded by electrified barbed wire and patrolled by armed security guards. From a distance his workplace could easily be mistaken for a prison.

His title is professor, but aside from a few lectures a year, he does not teach, his primary duty research. The center houses five barns and ten acres of pasture, and today he is supervising his graduate students and postdocs as they inoculate calves. They are sedated with xylazine, a midline incision is made in the skull and a hole drilled through the calvarium, and then the inoculum is injected into the midbrain via a disposable needle. The incision is closed with a single suture, and the surgical instruments, including the drill bits, are disposed of in a hazmat bag. You can’t be too careful when you’re deliberately infecting an animal with prions.

This is his specialty, prions, and as interested as he is in mad cow and chronic wasting disease, most of his research over the past ten years has concerned lobos.

His daughter, Sridavi, is a lost girl. That’s how he thinks of her—though really she is not so much a girl anymore at twenty-two. Her eyes swim with drugs. Her skin always has a sheen of sweat to it. Her bones press against her skin so harshly he fears they might cut through. The black smears beneath her eyes darken her otherwise yellowish complexion. Looking at her makes him feel scraped out by something sharp, a wound that no suture can help heal.

Ten years ago, he heard a crash in her room followed by a banshee scream. Her door was locked and she did not respond when he knocked or called her name, so he splintered the hinges with his weight. He has always been a big man, though not as big then as he is now, drinking gallons of sugary coffee, regularly peeling open candy bars for the rush that keeps him going all these long hours.

He barged into his daughter’s room and found the bookcase overturned and a pair of pants poking beneath it so that at first he thought her crushed. A growl rose from the corner. He spotted her then, at the head of her bed, curled up in a ball nearly curtained by her long black hair. His relief was short-lived. When he called out her name again, her hair parted and a demon’s face emerged from it, the eyes and mouth pocketed with blood.

He knew immediately what had befallen her even though he did not want to believe it. He should have retreated from the room, drawn closed the broken door, but he ran to her instead, stumbling over the mess of books, saying, no, no, no, as if to chase the demon out of her.

She sprang off her bed and he held out his arms to greet her. The impact knocked them both to the floor, where she clawed at him, parting the buttons of his shirt, flaying the skin from his chest, as if to tear the heart from him.

Though Neal outweighed his daughter by more than a hundred pounds, he could barely hold her down, her body rigid and humming with power, as if he were wrestling a sprung diving board. His wife stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth, and he told her to hurry, damn it, call 911.

And while he waited for the sirens to wail, for the police to tromp down the hallway with a tranquilizer syringe, while his daughter bucked against him and he strangled away her snapping jaw, his chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the shredded skin and blood pouring from it.

He strips off his booties and hazmat suit and tosses them in a bagged bin. He punches his personal code into the keypad and the light flashes green and the door unlocks with the
shunk
of the automatic deadbolt and he enters a white-tiled room and strips off his shoes and socks and underwear and undershirt and tosses them in another bin before standing under a blistering shower and scrubbing off and toweling dry and then heading into the locker room, where he spins his combo and yanks the lock and pulls out his gym bag and dresses in jeans and a long-sleeve collared Izod, a birthday present from his wife, not that he has any time or desire to golf anymore. His jacket he drapes over his arm.

He signs out with the night secretary, a woman named Beatrice, whose pink scalp glows through her thinning red hair. She buzzes him out of the lab and into a short gray hallway, undecorated except for a plastic ficus tree, its leaves leavened with dust. At the end of the hallway, a metal detector and X-ray machine. He says hello to the security guard, one of several posted at every building, then empties his pockets and tosses his bag on the conveyer and picks it up on the other side and says so long. He gets buzzed through another door and heads not into a reception area—they rarely see visitors here—but directly into the chill of the night.

He knows the Willamette Valley is temperate compared to the other side of the state, where he hears a snowstorm is dropping several inches tonight, but even after thirty years of living here, he can’t get used to the temperature dropping below fifty. The air is misting, a hesitant rain. He zips his jacket so quickly that the metal bites his neck, what his wife teasingly calls his second chin. He checks his fingers for blood when he walks a winding concrete path that takes him to the gate.

He can hear the electricity humming in the fence when he approaches. The guard here sits behind a sliding Plexiglas window that he opens to hand Neal a clipboard and pen. He smacks Nicorette and makes small talk about the Trail Blazers sucking it up again as Neal signs out. On his desk, a mess of log sheets and several television screens that offer fish-eye views of the center. The gate buzzes open and the two men wish each other good night.

He pulls out his keys and shakes them away from the remote clicker and punches the autostart on his Honda Accord to get the heater and butt warmer going. In the lot ahead of him, a scattering of cars and SUVs lit by lamps, the asphalt running up against a gully tangled with blackberry vines, plastic bags caught up in them like spider eggs.

The space behind his eyes throbs with the exhaustion of the day and the anticipation of what awaits him at home, his daughter likely glassy-eyed and catatonic and soiling herself from some combination of snorting too much Volpexx and smoking too much of the medical marijuana she’s prescribed. The last thing he wants to do is talk to someone—the gauntlet of security was bad enough—so he loudly sighs when he hears his name, “Dr. Desai?”

He turns and sees that the voice comes from the SUV next to his, a silver Chevy Equinox, its window down and dome light on, the soft yellow glow illuminating a round face that appears almost childish except for the wrinkles framing his mouth and the gray hairs collaring an otherwise bald head. “I’m sorry to bother you at this late hour.” He holds out a hand that is small and damp when Neal hesitantly shakes it. “But I have a business proposition for you.”

At the McMenamins brewpub, along the Willamette River, they sit by the rain-dotted window. A bridge reaches over the water and the lights staggered across it diamond the ripples beneath. Neal turns down the craft beer on special tonight, a nut brown, and orders tea instead.

The man—Augustus—folds his hands on the table, one on top of the other, as if they were napkins. “Are you Muslim?”

He is not. He is nothing. “I am exhausted.”

The waiter brings an ale for Augustus and a tray for Neal on which rests a small ceramic pot and an assortment of tea bags arranged like a fan. The waiter has a forked goatee and wears a hemp bracelet. He pulls a pen and pad from his apron and says, “And will we be ordering anything to eat this evening?”

Neal says no at the same time that Augustus says maybe. “Maybe,” Augustus says again, and the waiter says he’ll be back to check on them in a minute.

Neal selects a black tea and drops it in the cup and pours steaming water over it.

“Long day,” Augustus says.

“Yes.” He lets the tea steep another moment and then raises the cup for a drink.

“And a long night ahead?”

Neal says nothing, the teacup hanging before his lips, the steam warming his chin and making the image of the man before him warp. Augustus smiles, his teeth as small and white as corn kernels, and says, “Your poor daughter.”

The tea is hot in his hand. “What do you know of my daughter? Has she done something?” The steam trembles with his words.

“No.” Augustus laughs, a sharp little bark. “She hasn’t done a thing.” He sips from his beer and uses his napkin to dab the foam mustache from his upper lip. “Excuse me for prying. But she was bitten? Was that how she became infected?”

“No,” Neal responds automatically, though he isn’t sure why he is talking about this very private matter with a stranger. “She was exposed in another way.” He doesn’t elaborate. The disease had been sexually transmitted. Fifteen years old and sexually active and not using protection. The thought still makes him close his eyes with shame. He wishes she had been bitten instead—then maybe he wouldn’t blame her for what happened, her recklessness the cause of their life’s ruin.

“I’m sorry.”

The tea is bitter. He sets it down with a rattle and tears two sugar packs into it. “You’ll forgive me. I don’t follow politics. What is it that you do again?”

“Like I said, I’m chief of staff to the governor.”

“Yes, but what do you
do
?”

“I suppose I do what I have always done. I am a consultant. The presumption of my job is that management or boards or whoever—a politician, say—might not be…capable in all situations.” The lamplight makes his glasses glow. “I am the external competency.”

“I see.” He takes another drink of his tea, better now, and then stands to pull on his jacket and says sorry, he really ought to be going. He needs to get home to his family. If Augustus insists, the secretary can make an appointment during regular business hours and—

Augustus talks over the top of him. “Since your center is, as I see it, severely underfunded—even more so lately, with the budget cuts. And since I can be of service in this matter—if I feel so inclined. And since your daughter suffers from the very ailment we are both interested in curing, I don’t think you have any choice but to sit down and listen.” He drinks again from his beer, an ale as dark as the night. “Sit down, please.”

Neal does, slowly dropping back into his chair, his jacket still on.

The waiter appears again. “Have we made up our minds, gentlemen?”

“No, we have not,” Augustus says. “Not yet.” And the waiter wanders away again.

Neal listens to what Augustus has to say. Halfway through he realizes his tea has gone cold. And a few minutes after that he quiets his cell phone when it rings, not bothering to glance at the caller ID, knowing it is his wife wondering where he is. Except for occasionally nodding his head and smiling sadly, he hardly moves until Augustus stops talking, and then the two of them sit in silence for a long time, Neal avoiding eye contact, staring into his teacup as if there might be some message encoded in its leaves.

Augustus sips loudly from his glass. “Gosh, this beer is good.”

Neal does not like this man very much, but he can’t help but like what he has to say. He looks out the window. Dripping beards of moss hang from the trees. The river twists off into the distance. He sees their reflections hanging in the glass and studies the profile of the man studying him. It’s easier to look at him this way, avoiding his fixed gaze.

“Sometimes,” Neal says, “I think it would be easier if she had died.”

“Easier on her? Or easier on you?”

“Yes.”