Red Moon (19 page)

His phone buzzes and he rushes to check it, hoping for a message from his father, whom he still hasn’t heard from. No luck. It’s Max.

His thumb hesitates over the phone. The wind is cold and blustery, as high up as he is, and for a moment he wonders if he’ll go spinning away, as light as a leaf. He opens the message. “Hunting season,” it reads. “Be ready at dawn. Will pick you up.”

N
EAL’S DAUGHTER HAS
sunk unkindly into middle age. She looks as old as if not older than his wife. Her face, at one time more a fleshy moon, has grown sharply defined. She is beginning to go gray, the gray standing out so brightly against hair that is otherwise the glossy black of a gun barrel. He notices this most on weekends, the only time he is home to see her rise from bed, usually in the early afternoon, dragging herself to the kitchen to make coffee. Her eyes are dark craters. Her back hunched. Moving like a thing half-alive.

Every now and then he will come down hard on her, usually at his wife’s behest. “We are supporting you,” he will tell her, “and you need to support us. You need to contribute to the household.” She will cry and through her tears tell him how hard it is, how terrible she feels. He will comb his fingers through her hair and say, “There, there,” and she will dab her eyes and wipe her nose with a shirtsleeve and promise to do better. And she will.

He is always working, his wife is always working, and while they are gone Sridavi will make their beds, vacuum the carpets, scrub the coffee grounds and red wine blotches from the counters—and then, after a week or two, her room, and the rest of the house, will slip into the disrepair that is her standard. The coffee table has ghostly rings on it, like raindrops in a mud puddle. Unfolded laundry remains piled in the hamper. Crumbs spot the carpet. Mildew crawls along the corners of the shower. When doing yard work, she will leave the lawn half-mowed, a pile of branches trimmed but not bundled, everything unfinished, as she goes inside to get a drink of water and then forgets.

Sometimes, when he is on the phone with his friend Keith, when they are talking about prions, about the possibility of an inoculation, Neal will grow weary and distracted and interrupt the conversation to ask about Keith’s boy. “Is he the same? Is he like Sridavi? Lazy and unmanageable, sneaking away at night and sleeping all hours of the day?” But Keith always says, no, no, his boy’s a pretty good shit. And Neal is happy for him, he is, but another part of him wishes the boy were a problem. Then he could write off his daughter’s affliction as a product of her age instead of this disease. Something she might grow out of.

Sometimes, when he comes home from the lab, he has no energy to do anything but watch television with a plate of cold food in his lap. Usually he flips to the History or Discovery Channel and watches shows about evil dictators, Sasquatch and Loch Ness, the predictions of Nostradamus, what the world will look like after the people are wiped out by a disease that eats its way through the population or an asteroid that comes flaming out of the sky. He particularly loves the shows about haunted castles, houses, caves, catacombs.

He remembers one episode about a suburban home in Pennsylvania. A family moved in, and soon after, strange things began to happen. The lights would flicker and dim. The windows would open and close. A glass of water would drag across the table and shatter on the floor. One night, when the parents were reading in the living room, the couch turned over and the windows blasted open and from them came a wailing, like the noise of banshees. And another time, in the bathroom, the father noticed the paint bubbling and when he pressed his finger to it, it popped and bled. Soon after that, they brought in a psychic, a large black woman in a purple muumuu named Madam Serena, thinking she might identify a demon or an Indian burial ground.

Instead she claimed the haunting came from the daughter, a teenager, black haired, black fingernailed, dosed up on medication for her depression. She was possessed by a darkness that had in turn possessed their home. “She is devouring you,” Madam Serena said.

When Neal sits in the living room illuminated by the flickering light of the television, when he sees the vomit-splattered toilet bowl and hears the moans coming from his daughter’s room and faces the stiff, cold silence of his wife in bed, he, too, feels as though his daughter is slowly devouring him, devouring them all.

He isn’t sure what to blame, the drugs or the disease. Sometimes the drugs seem like the disease. He remembers a story his amah told him when he was a boy. He would help her in the kitchen, standing on a chair so that he could reach the counter—blending spices, mashing peas and potatoes, sculpting samosas—and she would tell him fairy tales about tigers and rupees, asses and elephants, magic fiddles, broken pots, the boy with the moon on his forehead and a star on his chin.

One of these stories was about a village that hired a snake to kill a troublesome jackal that ate babies and stole treasure and kept everyone awake at night with its cackling. The snake spread its jaws wide and ate the jackal whole, and for many minutes its wriggling form could be seen surging its way down the snake’s throat and distending its belly, where it at last went still. The snake then curled up and slept in the village square and digested the jackal and around it the villagers danced for many days in celebration, and eventually their stomping feet and jangly music woke the snake, which turned to them to satisfy its renewed hunger. In this way one beast replaced another. That is how he feels about his daughter.

Lycans used to take a high dosage of quaaludes—labeled Wolfsbane. Then, in the eighties, Volpexx hit the market, a chemical cocktail of antipsychotics and benzodiazepines / sedative-hypnotics. Over the years the formula has undergone many changes, but in its current form, the pills—taken twice daily, as round and white as miniature moons—are a stiff blend of 20 mg haloperidol and 4 mg lorazepam laced with silver. The drug is mandatory and available free to all registered lycans. There is no limit on the number of refills—there is only the demand that a patient test positive during the monthly blood test or face imprisonment. All one needs is an excuse—a bottle of pills misplaced—and a new prescription is filled.

Most people would not want to take more pills. Most people find the drug imprisoning, deadening, a denial of self. But his daughter is not most people. She takes Volpexx with Robitussin and NyQuil. She takes it with weed, with Red Bull, with Sudafed and Benadryl. She pops it and snorts it. Sometimes her skin seems so thin, as transparent as cellophane, that he can see her pulse in her veins from across the room. And sometimes she cries for no reason at all, cries for hours on end, her tears like dark rivers.

Neal does not mention this—not even when Augustus asks about his daughter—at the Deerstalker Golf Club outside of Eugene. “She’s good,” he says, and Augustus says, “Good. That’s good.” The day is damp and gray, the grass still heavy with last night’s rain, soaking their shoes and slowing their balls and giving the men a good excuse for their frequent slices and mulligans. Chase wears jeans and a Windbreaker, Neal and Augustus slacks and sweaters. They drive a golf cart along the slick asphalt path—the tires spitting, the clubs rattling when they round a corner—and behind them follows another cart carrying a two-man security
detail
.

At the eighth hole, a par five that doglegs left, Augustus and Chase both end up blasting away with their fat-headed drivers and hooking into the woods. Neal opts instead for a five iron, takes a few practice swings, and then gently thwacks his ball in a long, curving arc that comes to a rolling stop right where the fairway
elbows
.

Chase whistles appreciatively. “A real golfer.”

“Used to be.”

“What’s your handicap?”

“My handicap is golf.” He pats his stomach. “And ice cream.”

A quiet joke. In response Chase laughs a little too loudly. This is, Neal suspects, because of the Volpexx. More than an hour ago, when they met in the parking lot, Neal removed from his trunk a carton packed with one hundred bottles, each rattling with one hundred pills. He ordered them shipped to his campus office, instead of the lab, charging them to his discretionary fund.

Immediately Chase pulled a jackknife from his pocket and slashed open the box and popped open a canister and punched through the foil. “When I was growing up,” Chase said, “my cousin started getting these headaches. They’d come and go at first. Then it didn’t matter how much aspirin he took. They took him in after the nosebleeds started. Brain cancer. Inoperable. Thirteen years old. Tumor the size of a starfish. In the end, he started saying and doing the most terrible things. Nobody wanted to be around him because nobody recognized him.”

He used his sleeve to dry off the rain-spotted spoiler of a car. On it he crushed three pills with the cap of the bottle until they were a mess of white powder. He pulled out his wallet and cut the powder into two lines with a credit card. “That’s how I feel these days. With this
thing
inside me. I want you to kill it, Doc.”

Then he rolled a dollar into a straw and brought it to one nostril while plugging the other. He staggered back with his eyes watering, furiously rubbing his nose. Then he sneezed into his elbow and gave them a dopey grin and slapped both his knees and said, “Phew. That’s a dose of death right there.”

Now Neal joins the two men in the woods. They wade through the damp cover of oak leaves, the leaves slurping and squelching underfoot. They turn their faces downward and hunt for the balls they know they will not find. And while they move among the thick-waisted trees, ten feet apart, Augustus talks about the plan. It is a good plan, he thinks. They will start by making a call to
Senators
Wyden and Merkley.

Chase kicks over a pile of leaves and says, “I’ve punched Wyden. Twice.”

“He’ll forgive you. Because this is what we’re going to promise our dear senators: major campaign donations from Nike, Intel, Lithia, Harry and David, and Alliance Energy. Alliance Energy being the key. One of our major talking points over the next few months being nuclear energy. In turn, the Senate earmarks a lump sum from the federal budget for the Center for Lobos Studies, which will remain affiliated with the Infectious Disease Research Center and which our man, the distinguished Dr. Desai, will direct. And hopefully we will have a vaccine in place within the next two years. That’s completely possible. You’ve said that’s possible.”

Neal peers out of the woods and eyes the fairway and judges the angle of their drive and guesses again the placement of the balls. He does not look at Augustus when he says, “Creating the vaccine is not a problem. Implementing it is. The ACLU has blocked vaccine research the past twenty years.”

“These are special times. America is under attack.”

When Neal was a boy—in Los Angeles, his father first generation and a professor of psychiatric studies—he would spend his weekends hunting for golf balls. Trolling the woods, raking the sand traps, wading the ponds. The courses would pay him a nickel a ball. The groundskeepers thought he was Mexican and called him José. He said he was Indian and they asked about his headdress and tomahawk and he said, “Not that kind of Indian.
Indian
Indian.” He carried a backpack with him and by the end of the day it would be full of Titleists and Dunlops. He would bring his goggles and wear his swim trunks and dive down into the gray-green murkiness of the course’s ponds and lakes, holding his breath until his lungs ached, until his vision went spotty, clawing golf balls from the muddy bottom like pearls.

Now he approaches a rhododendron and peaks under it and spies the dimpled white ball and feels that old excitement that comes whenever he discovers what no one else can. He holds his breath as he bends over his gut and palms the ball. “So it’s as simple as that?”

“There’s nothing simple about it. But it will work.” Augustus removes his glasses and untucks a flap of his shirt to clean the lenses and inspects Neal as if he might need some polishing as well. “We’re going to make certain you get the support you deserve.”

“Are you?”

“We are.” Two angry red lines run from his ears to his eyes, the skin pinched by the stems of his glasses. “Because once you develop the vaccine, you will be both the governor’s benefactor and beneficiary.”

Chase has given up his search. At the edge of the woods, he leans against a tree with a glassy-eyed look and smokes a cigarette. Neal approaches him and holds up the ball and says, “Found what you were looking for,” and Chase draws on his cigarette and blinks confusedly through the smoke and then reaches out his hands, palms up, as though he hopes Neal will join him in prayer.

T
IME PASSES.
How much, Claire doesn’t know, whether minutes or hours or days, with no light except the glow of the LED strand, no company outside of the black stone and black sand, so that she is nearly unconscious, somewhere between sleeping and waking, the cold making her body and mind numb, and even when she tries to collect her thoughts they flutter away like the bats roosting among the cracks. In the corner sits a bucket and a roll of toilet paper. Her feet remain handcuffed, but her arms are free. “I don’t want to make you miserable,” her uncle said when he snapped them into place. “But I need to know I can trust you before I take these off.” She feels no emotion, no panic or anger or fear, just blankness, when she stares at a block of basalt, at the porous holes and knuckly bumps of its black surface like a landscape of its own, like a hidden world within this world, no different from the community that exists in these lava tubes.

She isn’t sure how many lycans there are, maybe dozens, maybe more, but she understands from the electricity flowing through the tunnels and the conversations overheard and the many men who have brought her food—on a tray, no less, with a plate and a glass and silverware and a napkin, venison sausage and a beet vinaigrette salad, rice and rosemary chicken, food that could not have been cooked without a working kitchen—that this is more than a camp; it is a kind of undertown.

She wakes to Puck standing over her. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Because my uncle told you not to bother me.”

“Some uncle. Handcuffs on your ankles. Nothing but a pot to piss in.”

“I never said I liked him.”

He has been smiling all along, but now the smile grows wider. He holds up his disfigured hand, the one missing its pinky and ring finger, a gummy nub of tissue. The remaining fingers carry thick yellow nails. “Compliments of your aunt. Do you want to know how it happened?” He does not wait for her response. “The slut always walks around in next to nothing. Little tank tops and such. Wanting everyone looking at her, wishing for a peek, hoping for a squeeze. So that’s what she gets. I come up behind her one day when she’s working in the kitchen, cutting some vegetables, and I give her a nice rub. Hands on her shoulders. Real friendly. Not in the least inappropriate. Just wanting to ease some tension. She’s a tense person, your aunt. And what does she do to repay my kindness? Flips around without warning, swings the knife, cuts me to the bone. I’m not one to take my punishment sitting down. We got into a bit of a row.”

She notices his crotch bulging with an erection. His eyes go someplace far away before focusing in on her once again. “I could take those cuffs off, you know? It wouldn’t be much trouble at all.” He takes a step toward her and the cave seems suddenly very small.

All the men carry walkie-talkies on their belts, and his sizzles to life then. A voice calling for him. He unclips it and says, “What?” as if the word were a curse.

There is a shipping problem. A delay. The nitro. They need his help. “Will be right there,” he says and then bites down on the antenna and stares at her.

“I’m going to tell Jeremy about this,” she says, just to say something, to stop the penetrating silence of his stare.

His teeth unclip from the antenna. “Child.” His hair is so white it might be aflame. “You seem to think he’s in charge. He would like that. He would very much like that. But he’s not, not at all. Despite the fact that he’s always rubbing it in my face what a big shit he is.”

“If he’s not in charge, then who is?”

His expression goes slack and his eyes seem to pulse, to widen. “Balor.”

The .30-06 was a birthday gift when Patrick turned fourteen. It was his father’s, a Mossberg. Walnut forearm, checkered stock, bluish metal, worn leather strap. Holding it, breathing in the smell of gun oil, brings him back to California. Rising well before dawn, his father opening his door, gently saying up and at ’em, a breakfast of eggs and bacon waiting at the table. Blaze-orange jackets and hats. A thermos of coffee set between them on the bench seat of the truck. The empty highway, the gravel side roads, the thick black forest into which they hiked when the horizon began to brighten pinkly with dawn.

He shipped the rifle, along with a few boxes of books and clothes, back in August. That was one of the things his father stressed, how good the hunting was up in Oregon, as though Patrick were headed off on vacation.

Now the rifle is in the bed of a Chevy Silverado and he is crushed into the club cab. There are five of them in the truck, all wearing a blend of camo and denim and blaze orange. Max drives. When they picked Patrick up, he asked where they were going and Max said, “On a wolf hunt.” He says he has a feeling about the hot springs. It’s too random of a place to attack otherwise. Why not a mall or a park or a church service? He figures some lycans came across the bathers by accident, saw an opportunity. They’re in, they’re out, just as the snow starts falling to cover their tracks, and a few days later, when the bodies are discovered, they’re holed up, nowhere to be found.

Before Patrick can respond, Max snaps on the radio. Nobody talks, not that they could, the speakers blasting some punk band called Slovak, the electric guitar sounding like knives on knives, the words garbled into screaming that makes Patrick’s ears feel as though they might bleed. At one point he asks if they can turn it down a little.

“Max?” he says. “Max?”

Nothing. The other Americans stare straight ahead as if so intent on the music blasting from the stereo they do not recognize his voice. Not for the first time, he wonders what he is doing in their company.

They follow paved roads that branch off into cinder and dirt slippery with snow. They drive past houses and single-wides that give way to timber broken up by five-acre clear-cuts. They pass logging trucks, the trees in their beds whittled down to pencils. The Forest Service road they follow angles steeply upward, deeply rutted and choked with weeds, the trees growing closer, the braches occasionally reaching out like icy claws to screech on the windshield until finally they come to a place where a landslide washes out the road and they park beside the tide of boulders and frozen mud.

“Here we are,” Max says and kills the ignition.

A few years ago, at her friend Stacey’s, Claire was sunbathing in the backyard when a shadow fell across her—she felt the cool of it like a wet towel—and she opened her eyes to find Stacey’s younger brother hovering over them with an air rifle in one hand and a rabbit in the other. He had killed it in the woods near the house. He flopped its body at the girls and they said gross and threatened to rip out his hair and paint his toenails if he kept bothering them. And then something came over Claire—she wasn’t sure what—and she stole the air rifle from his hands. There was a robin singing in a nearby tree and she stalked toward it, wearing her purple bikini, rifle at her shoulder. She fired. There was a snap sound. The robin dropped from the tree and lay still. Stacey’s brother whooped, but she was quiet when she crouched by the bird and scooped it up. It weighed nothing. Its eyes were glassy—its beak swelling with a bubble of blood. She had never felt so horrible in her life and swore she would never kill anything again—that is, until later that afternoon, when she ate a steak her father had grilled. But still, she felt horrible and preferred not to think about killing as a part of life.

Yet here she is, trying to decide how best to kill Puck—or whoever comes along first; she isn’t picky—and all the different ways she might escape. She needs to stay sharp. She needs to be ready, as Miriam taught her.

So she does as Miriam taught her and transforms. Lets the wolf turn over inside her, at first to test her strength, to see if she can snap the chain, and then to pass the time. She isn’t sure how much noise she makes—she isn’t sure how she gets from one side of the cave to the other—she isn’t sure how her clothes tear or a gash appears in her forehead. Whenever she settles down—when her heartbeat slows and her breathing calms and her body resumes its original form—her memory of the past few minutes is like a cloudy dream.

Her ankles bleed from yanking at the cuffs. But the pain doesn’t bother her. If there is anything the past few months have taught her, it is that the familiarity of pain makes it easier to manage, her body like one big nerve deadened by affliction.

Her senses grow heightened. She notices the whisper of a bat’s wing, the faraway char of meat cooking, the small shifts in the air as the cave breathes. She knows someone is coming—like an image glimpsed in a lamplit window or a conversation overheard in the buzz of a bar—she knows this long before she hears the footsteps in the sand. Soon he will turn the corner. Soon he will be within reach. If it is Puck, and if he comes close enough, she will go for his neck and his eyes. She will kill him.

It takes Patrick time to make sense of what he sees. The circumference of strewn carcass—the hair and the blood and the bone—reaches fifteen feet across. And then he recognizes the head of a doe, still attached to the spine, a little ways off. A beetle lumbers out of its mouth and creeps along its snout to sample the black pool of its eye.

He is alone. Ten minutes ago, he and the others split up, stalking different sections of the woods. It wasn’t long before their footsteps fell away. Now the wind rises and a drift of ice-polished leaves twirls up into a small cyclone before falling apart with a rattle. There are piles of snow here and there, but much of it has melted and frozen again. He isn’t sure whether he should call out or not, tell the others to come see. But what would a dead deer prove? A cougar could have done this as well as a lycan.

His phone buzzes and he pulls it out, surprised he gets service this far from town. The message, from Malerie, reads, “I was protecting you. But I guess you don’t need my protection.”

He has no idea what to make of this and considers ignoring her altogether but feels enough concern to fire off a question mark in response. Before he can think any further, he hears a thrashing, faint and far ahead, something pressing through the undergrowth. He clicks off the safety of his rifle and starts forward, taking care not to step on a stick or crunch through an ice puddle or kick through a bush. After a minute the sound dies away and he pauses, cocking his head until he hears it again, tracking it. In this stop-and-go manner he proceeds for a good five minutes.

He tries to steady his breathing. It could be one of the Americans after all. It could be anyone, anything. He can feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He imagines the trees parting like a curtain to reveal the lycan from the plane, crouched on a stump like a gargoyle, with a grin full of far too many teeth. Patrick wonders what chance he will stand this time, with no body to drape over him, nowhere to hide. He of course wishes he could run as fast as his legs will carry him, until the forest is a brown blur, back to the truck. But every time he feels rooted in place, ready to turn and flee, he thinks of his father, who would not run.

The sound, he realizes, has not moved. It comes from roughly the same place—now thirty paces ahead, where the ground angles downward into a coulee. He hears the faint trickle of water, and—interrupting it—a splash.

He reaches the lip of the coulee, where the land drops and the trees angle upward like arms crooked at the elbow. He sees, at the bottom of it, through a willow cluster, in the spring-fed stream, the mule deer. Two big bucks facing off.

He lifts the rifle and glasses them with his scope. He tries to count their points and cannot, their crowns tangled together in combat. The larger of the two weeps blood from where a tine punctured its eye. A red trail oozes from its ear—and several more from its neck—where it has been speared. The animals are silent except for the occasional snort, the splash of a hoof when they redistribute their weight, whip their heads around. The water, as dark as blackberry wine, rushes along beneath them, but mostly they are still, seeming to rest against each other. Patrick then realizes their antlers are locked, so tightly entwined they cannot release.

His finger slides off the guard and caresses the trigger as he imagines the racks mounted in his bedroom. He can see them so clearly, it is as though they are already there, anchored above his bed and casting their shadows like forking branches on the wall when he walks in and flips on the light.

He fires. The larger deer collapses. The creek runs over its body like a boulder and makes a foaming collar around its raised neck. Their crowns remain locked and the smaller of the bucks stands frozen in place with its head bowed toward the river as if for an endless drink.

His handheld buzzes. The deer isn’t going anywhere, so he checks the message before reloading. Malerie again. “I know about your mother,” she writes, “and now Max does 2.”

He nearly drops the phone, forgetting all about the woods and the deer and everything else, all his attention crushed down to a single sentence that makes his chest seem to collapse so that he can barely draw a breath, when his mind makes a swift series of calculations—Malerie, Walgreens, the list of names—and still he doesn’t really understand what this means until he looks up and sees Max standing on the other side of the coulee, rifle in hand, looking at him.

Claire pretends to sleep. She hears the footsteps grow near, hears breathing. She imagines Puck standing there, his hair fluorescent, watching her, maybe toying with his belt or zipper. Her blood goes hot, that catch-flame feeling that precedes transformation. She opens her eyes slightly, just enough to spy through her lashes, and discerns a shadow far larger than she expected. She flinches—sure that the giant is leaning over her, the black flaps of his leather duster opening, spreading as wide as buzzards’ wings—ready to cry out.

But it is only her uncle. He holds up his hands as if she were the threat. “Hey, hey,” he says. “It’s all right.” His face is broad and kind, haloed by thick brown curls, and though she wants to hate him, it’s hard to feel anything but relief when he digs in his pocket and removes a key and nods at her cuffs. “I thought I’d show you around. As long as you promise not to try anything stupid?” At first she doesn’t respond and his hand closes around the key and hides it from view. Only then does she nod, and he says, “Good.”