Red Moon (2 page)

Troy leans toward him until their shoulders touch. “Don’t worry so much. Flying’s a piece of cake. I do it all the time.”

The man realizes that his mouth is open, that he is breathing rapidly. He snaps his teeth together with a clack. He blinks at a shutter speed. “I’m fine.”

“Here’s the thing,” Troy says. “Almost all plane crashes happen—I read this for a fact…or maybe I saw it on the TV—but almost all crashes happen when the plane is taking off and when the plane is landing. Now, we’re taking off, I suppose you could say, until we’ve reached our cruising altitude. When that happens, the lady stewardess will say so, will say you can use your computer. And there will be a bong.” He makes his hand open up like a flower when he says
bong
. “Then you know you’re good. Statistically, I mean.”

For the next few minutes the man stares at the clouds curling around the plane. And then a soft-toned bell sounds from above.

“There it is!” Troy says. “We’re in the clear.”

The flight attendant gets on the intercom again, telling them that it’s now safe to use approved portable electronic devices. They will, however, be experiencing turbulence for the next half hour or so and she asks that everyone please keep their seat belts fastened and move about the cabin only if they must.

The plane is shaking. Or maybe he is shaking. He feels a lurching sensation, as if he is being thrown out of his body. His heart hammers. His breath comes in and out in quick gasps. Troy is saying something—his mouth is moving—but the man can’t hear him.

His seat belt unclicks with the noise of a switchblade.

Patrick wishes he hadn’t ordered the large Coke. But he was tired, and he doesn’t drink coffee because it tastes like dirt, and the large cup cost only ten cents more than the medium—so he thought, what the hell. It’s been one of those mornings. A
what the hell
morning. His father is leaving his son, is leaving his job at Anchor Steam, is leaving to fight a war, his unit activated. And Patrick is leaving his father, is leaving California, his friends, his high school, leaving behind everything that defined his life, that made him
him
. Though he feels like punching through windows, torching a building, crashing a car into a brick wall, he has to stay relatively cool. He has to say
what the hell
. Because his father asked him to. “I don’t want to go. And you don’t want to go. But we gotta go. And it’s only for twelve months,” he said. “Consider it a vacation. A chance to get to know your mom a little better.” Twelve months. That’s how long his father’s deployment would last. Patrick has to suck it up and hang tight until then.

But now he has to pee. And he has the window seat. And there is no way he can sneak past the two women sitting next to him without making them shut their laptops, making them stand, making a big production, making everybody on the plane look up and stare at him and think, “Oh, that kid has to pee.” And they will be thinking that—they will be thinking about him
peeing
—when he locks himself into the chemical-smelling closet of a bathroom and struggles with his zipper and tries to maintain his balance, tries not to piss all over himself while turbulence shakes the plane. Maybe he can hold it. Or maybe not—it’s another two hours to Portland—and the pressure is so intense his bladder is beginning to throb. Just as he is about to touch his neighbor on the wrist, to tell her excuse me, he’s sorry but he has to get up, someone two rows ahead of him, a man in a charcoal suit, rises from his seat.

His face is pale and sweating. His body seems twitchy along the edges, almost as if he were humming, vibrating. His neatly combed hair is starting to come loose in gray strands that fall across his forehead. Patrick wonders if the turbulence is getting to him, if he is going to be sick. The man staggers down the aisle, yanks open the bathroom door, and slams it shut behind him.

Patrick curses under his breath. Not only does he have to wait, but he has to wait for a puker who’s going leave his chunks all over the mirror and toilet and door handle. He turns around in his seat three times in as many minutes, checking the bathroom, willing the door to open. Each time he looks there is another person standing in the aisle, all of them with their arms crossed, their faces pensive, waiting. He supposes he should join them.

He unbuckles his seat belt and opens his mouth—ready to finally excuse himself, to stand—when a ragged snarl comes from the back of the cabin. It is hard to place, with the shout of the engines, the chatter of so many voices. Patrick wonders if there is something wrong with the plane. He remembers seeing a news report about how so many planes are behind on their maintenance schedules and shouldn’t be in the air at all. Maybe the turbulence has shaken loose the screws holding the tail in place.

There is a growl, a long, drawn-out guttural rumbling, and though it is hard to place, it seems more animal than machine. The cabin is now hushed except for the creaking of seats as people turn around with anxious expressions.

Then the bathroom door crashes open.

A bald man in a Rose Bowl sweatshirt is the first in line for the restroom—and so he is the first to die. The door jars him back. He would have fallen except for the narrow hallway where he stands, the wall catching him and preventing any further retreat as the thing emerges from the restroom, rushing forward like a gray wraith, a blurred mass of hair and muscle and claws. It swings an arm. The bald man’s scream is cut short, his throat excised and replaced by a second red mouth that he brings his hands to, as if he could hold the blood in place. But it sprays between his fingers. As if to make up for his sudden silence, the rest of the passengers begin to scream, all of their voices coming together like a siren that rises and falls.

The thing begins to move up the aisle.

Patrick is reminded of a possum his father once trapped. They live on a hobby farm north of San Francisco, near Dogtown, a half acre of carrots and tomatoes and raspberry bushes, three goats, bee boxes, a henhouse. One night the chickens exploded into a panicked clucking, and by the time his father raced to the coop, his flashlight cutting through the dark, the whirl of feathers, he found broken eggs littering the floor and a half-dead hen in the corner missing a wing and a clump of its throat. So they set up a trap, a cage with a spring-loaded door that crashed closed. They baited it with hard-boiled eggs and old bananas. And by the next night they had their possum. It hissed and paced the length of the cage and threw itself against the bars and chewed at them with its needle teeth and reached forth a claw to rake the air. Patrick had once heard his science teacher say that animals didn’t feel the same way that humans did, but Patrick was sure he was wrong. The possum felt deeply. It felt rage and hatred. It wanted to kill them for what they had done to it. And though Patrick knew he was safe, knew the cage would hold, knew his father would soon slide a pistol between the bars and fire, he kept his distance and flinched every time the possum crashed its body against the enclosure.

Of course he knows what the thing is. A lycan. He has heard about them his whole life, has read about them in novels, history books, newspapers, watched them in movies, television shows. But he has never seen one, not in person. Transformation is forbidden.

The lycan moves so quickly it is difficult for Patrick to make sense of it—to secure an image of it—except that it looks like a man, only covered in a downy gray hair, like the hair of the possum. Teeth flash. Foam rips from a seat cushion like a strip of fat. Blood splatters, decorating the porthole windows, dripping from the ceiling. It is sometimes on all fours and sometimes balanced on its hind legs. Its back is hunched. Its face is marked by a blunt snout that flashes teeth as long and sharp as bony fingers, a skeleton’s fist of a smile. And its hands—oversize and decorated with long nails—are greedily outstretched and slashing the air. A woman’s face tears away like a mask. Ropes of intestine are yanked out of a belly. A neck is chewed through in a terrible kiss. A little boy is snatched up and thrown against the wall, his screams silenced.

The plane is shuddering. The pilot is yelling something over the intercom, but his voice is lost to the screams that fill the cabin. Some people are weeping. Some are praying. Some are climbing out of their seats, pushing their way up the aisle, where they bang at the cockpit door, slam their fists and feet and shoulders up against it, desperate to get in, to get away from the terror working its way toward them.

Patrick remembers watching television the other night, flipping through the channels, coming across one of those talk-show pundits. The program featured a round-cheeked man who looked more like a boy with a gray flattop. He was talking about the lycans, about the protests in D.C. and the situation in the Republic. “To hell with us all being equal,” the baby-faced man was saying, staring intensely into the camera. “Nobody’s saying my dog has the same rights that I do. Biology made these decisions, not me.”

His father took the remote and punched the power button, and the image collapsed upon itself. “That guy makes me lose my appetite,” he said and forked at his spaghetti, not eating it, stirring it up into a red mess. His face was pale and bloated from all the injections, the temporary immunizations that could help ward off infection in case he was bitten. He would be leaving in a few days—with his Bay Area unit, the 235th Engineering Company—first to the Petaluma Armory for a week of intensive briefing, then overseas to the Republic, where his primary objective was route clearance, removing and diffusing bombs from roadsides. The IEDs—and the ambushes, the firefights—had increased lately. The lycans fought with their guns and claws alike—they wanted the American forces to leave; they wanted their country back. His father’s rucksack was already packed and waiting by the back door, swollen and green and reminding Patrick of an enormous gut sack pulled from a deer carcass.

The war is the reason this is happening. It is the reason he is on this plane and it is the reason the lycan is tearing the plane to pieces. Patrick curses the war and curses the lycan and curses his father, who he wishes were with him now. His father, who would ball up his fists and fight. He wouldn’t piss himself, as Patrick does now, his jeans hot and soaked, the Coke finally finding its way out of him, sheeting his legs, filling his shoes.

The rear of the plane is splashed with blood that oozes from the walls in strange cave-painting designs. Bodies are strewn everywhere in various poses of death like a garden of ruined statues. Up to this point, the woman next to Patrick has not moved or said a word, frozen in her fear. Her laptop remains open, one of her hands still on its keyboard, pressed down so severely that the open document scrolls continuously, its pages filling with the letters of one long word no one will ever read. But now, as the lycan makes its way toward their row, she tries to stand and can’t, held down by her seat belt. She whimpers as she fumbles with it and then abandons her seat and hesitates in the aisle, turning back for her laptop, snatching it off the tray table. At that moment the lycan lunges forward and claws away the laptop and brings it down on her head, with a wet
thunk
and a smoking spark. Pieces of plastic rain to the floor. Wires dangle like veins from around her neck, where part of the screen still hangs. The lycan pulls her close, as if to embrace her, burying its triangular face in her neck.

At that moment there is a scream that rises above all the others. An Asian man—one of the flight attendants—is hurrying up the aisle, his progress slow and stumbling due to the carnage. He has come from the rear kitchen and he has in one hand a steaming carafe of coffee and in the other a can opener with a curved silver tooth.

The lycan tosses the woman aside just as the man underhands the coffee in a sloshing brown arc. The woman’s body impacts Patrick before he can see what happens, but he can hear the lycan crying out, unmistakably in pain, its voice pitched high.

He is knocked back against the wall. He does not push the woman away. He allows her to press him down between the seats, to shield him. The smell of her perfume is mixed up with the smell of her blood. It is hard to tell with the turbulence, but her body seems to tremble and he thinks she might still be alive. He hugs her close. He closes his eyes and in his own private darkness tries to imagine himself back in bed, back in California, waiting for his father to wake him up, to tell him it is time to go. He wishes that he could close his ears, too, to the screams that continue for the next thirty minutes, the longest of his life.

A
UGUST AND ALREADY
it is snowing. Fat flakes brush past her window. She sits at her desk, a desk her father built from an old cherry tree, the legs carved to look like an animal’s, etched with wavelike fur and clawed at their bottom. It doesn’t match the rest of the room. The white four-poster bed with the stuffed animals marching across it, the matching white dresser with vines stenciled along its drawers, its top a mess of makeup and perfume bottles. The wobbly bookshelf weighed down with fantasy novels, collections of fables and fairy tales. The rank heaps of clothes, the orange throw rug, the purple walls decorated with posters for
Cats
, Wilco,
The Wizard of Oz
. The corkboard plastered with homecoming photos, a drink coaster, a smiley-face key chain, yellowed comic strips, track ribbons, an old corsage rose from some boy she couldn’t care less about that now looks like a shriveled-up heart.

Claire splits open a college catalogue, one of two dozen she has stacked in a leaning pile. She has shot off hundreds of emails, it seems like, requesting information from admissions offices. This is her senior year and she is planning her escape, hunting for something other than the eternal cold, the Friday fish fries, the polka music and pine-paneled, steel-roofed taverns northern Wisconsin has to offer.

She makes notes in a yellow legal tablet about tuition, class size, acceptance rate, student population, renowned programs, touristy info about the town or city, and—of course—distance from home. Distance being one of her priorities. She doesn’t care how strong the English Department is at Macalester College—if the school is within five hundred miles of home, she isn’t interested.

It is not as though she comes from a broken home, an unloving family. Her mother is a bit of a scold. Her father spanked her—once, when she was little more than a toddler—for wandering out of their house, their yard, and down the street. The two of them bray constantly about politics and rarely take her on vacation to anyplace other than Wisconsin Dells. Otherwise, she is lucky, even spoiled. She knows this. But she also knows—has known since she was a child, her head buried in a book—that she craves something more, almost like a taste filling her mouth, spreading through her body, into her very marrow, the deepest part of her. Adventure. The kind that cannot be found here, in this wooded hamlet, where the pines are thick and the lakes are clear and cheese is never far from hand.

Palm trees would be nice. She imagines reading a textbook on a white sand beach running up against water as blue as the antique bottles her mother keeps lined up on the bathroom windowsill.

The lamplight burnishes the catalogues with a golden color. She flips through them once for the pictures, again for the information, the way some of her friends work their way through fashion magazines. She is a sucker for the pictures. The clock towers, the brickwork paths, the sunlit campus lawns. Celebrity speakers standing before packed auditoriums. Dark-wooded libraries aglow with light streaming through stained-glass windows. Shirtless boys in hemp necklaces tossing Frisbees. Thick-necked mud-splattered girls chasing each other on rugby fields. Circles of students sitting under elm trees with their laptops and notepads open while an oddly dressed, wild-haired professor stands over them. The sight of them warms her belly with a feeling not so different from hunger.

Some schools, she notes, advertise the percentage of lycans, the support groups, the dorms and fraternities and sororities, and others do not. Somewhere in her pile is a William Archer catalogue. Her parents are alums of the university—and though her father hasn’t insisted she apply, he has brought it up several times, what a remarkable experience he had there, how they offer legacy scholarships, how safe and comfortable she would feel surrounded by her own kind. “Especially in these difficult times,” he said.

She isn’t interested. As it is, she hangs out with too many lycans. Her parents are always hosting meetings and potlucks—and most of the people who come are like them: obsessive, always slamming their fists into their palms, speaking in earnest, almost pleading voices about how unfairly lycans are treated, how U.S. troops remain in the Lupine Republic only to maintain control of the uranium reserves. How things
must
change. She gets it. She does. But they’re always so violently leftist, and sometimes she wants to argue with them—point out how the Republic’s leadership actually
supports
the U.S. role in extracting fuel and maintaining order, how only a select group of extremist lycans seem upset about the occupation—but she never feels educated enough to speak and doesn’t want to rile them up further.

And she wouldn’t mind talking about other things too, like, you know, her favorite episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
or how Mike Romm has sewer breath or how she can see the defined bulge of Mr. Bronson’s crotch when he wears his khakis in AP Calculus. Or whatever. She doesn’t particularly
like
being a lycan. Her parents would hate to hear her say that, but it’s true. The duality of the condition makes her feel sometimes split in two, as if she is at war with herself. Life is easier when that part of her remains dormant, neglected.

And though William Archer is located in Montana, outside Missoula, and satisfies her five-hundred-mile-radius requirement, the campus sits at the top of a bowl-like valley walled in by mountains, and—for the next four years, at least—she is done with cold. She is staring at the window as she thinks this, staring at the feathery snow dancing past it, and then her eyes focus on the nearer distance, where her reflection hangs in the glass.

She looks pale in the window and knows that the color in her face, the tan she has worked so hard on over the summer—smearing her skin with baby oil when she mows the lawn, when she water-skis at Loon Lake or sunbathes on the rocks that ring its shore—will soon drain from her skin as the clouds pile up in the sky, as she mummifies herself with hats and scarves and coats to scare away the wind that comes whistling down from Canada.

Again, the beach comes to mind, the white sand beach. She is sprawled out on a red towel that matches her painted toenails and the stripes running across her peppermint bikini. Her belly is as tan and flat as a pancake. Her nose is sugared with the freckles the sun brings out of it. She has set her textbook aside because a man—a lean, muscled, shirtless man with a black shock of hair—is walking toward her with a picnic basket full of wine and strawberries and chocolate. This is Raúl, her boyfriend. They will meet in a freshman honors seminar and will make love for the first time in a hammock strung between two palm trees. His skin will taste like salt and his smile will be as white as the meat of a coconut.

Her father shouts from downstairs, shouts at the television he has been watching most of the day, and the white sand of her dream rises in a sparkling swirl, replaced by the white snow brushing past her window.

Earlier that day, she met her friend Stacey at Starbucks, and then they walked to the park, where they drank their flavored coffees on the swings, halfheartedly kicking their legs, their sneakers nosing the gravel. The cold front was just beginning to move in, the sky a churning gray that blotted out the sun, and the swings around them began to creak alive as if inhabited by ghosts. “It’s not fair,” she said. “Our last days of summer—we’re getting robbed.”

When she came home, her nose pink and dripping from the cold, she found her mother sitting on the couch and her father pacing in front of the fireplace, the mouth of it crackling and spitting with fire. She could tell she had interrupted a conversation. The two of them stared at her, her father with his mouth open, his hand raised midgesture. The flames in the fireplace snapped and bent sideways against the wind and then licked their way upright when she closed the door. “What?” she said.

Her mother is slender and sharp edged, her graying hair cut short around a rectangular face. That morning she was wearing jeans and a red hooded sweatshirt with a UW Badger imprinted on its breast. Her legs were crossed and moving like scissors. “Something has happened,” she said and looked to her husband to explain.

Claire’s father sometimes appeared mismatched next to his wife, oversize and always moving, shouting, sometimes with anger but more often with enthusiasm punctuated by throaty laughter. He is a thickly built man, broad shouldered and big gutted, but with a kind face that looks like a child’s, only creased around its edges like a photograph lost at the bottom of a drawer. He works independently as a carpenter—his shed built onto the back of their garage—and his fingernails are always bruised and his hair always carries wood shavings in it like dandruff.

He told her, in a gruff, halting way, about the attacks. The three planes. One had crashed outside of Denver, a fiery smear in a wheat field. The other two had landed, in Portland and Boston, the pilots locked safely in the cockpit, but with only one passenger still alive, on Flight 373, a boy, a teenager not yet identified. No one knew much else.

Her parents took her to the kitchen, where the TV was muted, the same footage cycling over and over, a faraway shot of a plane parked on a runway surrounded by emergency vehicles flashing their lights. The red banner along the bottom of the screen read that nationwide all flights had been grounded, that a lycan terrorist cell was suspected, and that the president promised a swift and severe response.

Her parents stood to either side of her, studying her, waiting for her to respond.

She understood how awful this was, but it felt so distant and unreal, like a film, someone else’s nightmare, that she had difficulty processing it emotionally. She could only say, “That’s terrible,” like an actor trying out a line. Her father’s face hardened. He had told her before—once when she said she didn’t feel like visiting her grandfather in hospice—that she was empathy proof. “Typical teenager,” he had said, and she had hated him for it.

She could tell he was thinking the same thing now. A blush crept up his throat like a rash.

“Why are you so upset?” she said. “I mean, I get it—it’s horrible that these people died—but you’re acting like you killed them or something.”

Her parents shared a look full of meaning unavailable to her.

She retreated to her room for the rest of the afternoon, yelling down once, leaning over the railing, asking her mother if she was going to make dinner or what? Her mother had spoken so quietly, Claire barely caught her response: “I’m not hungry.”

She could hear the television at times, and then, when it fell silent, her father’s voice as he spoke on the phone, whispering harshly into the receiver.

Not long ago, he came to her room. Normally he just barged in with a “Hello, hello,” but tonight he knocked and waited.

She cracked the door open and said through the crack, “What?” her hand on the knob.

He took a step forward and then back, thinking better of it, clearing his throat and asking if he might come in. He wanted to talk to her about something.

She sighed and plopped onto the bed and he wandered around as if trying to decide where to sit, before joining her, his weight depressing the mattress another few inches and making her lean toward him. He had a pensive look on his face and a white envelope pinched between his fingers that he handed to her.

“What’s this?”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing. But if something does happen, I want you to open this.”

She blew out a sigh. “Don’t be so dramatic.” She took the envelope and tossed it, and it twirled like a broken-winged bird onto her desk. Her father kept his eyes on it. He wouldn’t look at her. She noticed a wood chip tangled in the hair above his ear and she plucked it out and he absently touched the place it had been.

“Dad,” she said, and he said, “Yeah?”

She couldn’t believe that anyone would care about them. They were boring. They lived in the middle of nowhere. They hadn’t done anything to anyone. “You think they’re going to—what?—like, put every lycan in the country in jail? This has nothing to do with us.”

He opened his hands and stared at them as if the answer might lie in the rough design of his palms. “There are things you don’t know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He smiled sadly, throwing an arm around her and drawing her close. Her nose filled with the smells of sap and Old Spice. “I’m probably worrying for no reason. But hey, better safe than sorry.”

Her mother’s voice called from downstairs. “Howard? Your phone is buzzing.”

“Yeah,” he yelled. “Coming.” He stood and the bed sprang back into its shape, the coils of the box spring creaking with relief. He walked to the desk and laid one of his square-tipped fingers on the envelope and tapped it twice. “Indulge me, okay?”

“Fine.”

Now Claire shoves aside her college catalogues and purses her lips and picks up the envelope, turning it over, testing its weight with the tips of her fingers. She doesn’t know if there is money in it. Or a letter. Or both. She doesn’t know whether she should open it now, or if not now, then when? How will she know?

Nor does she know what’s happening outside right this minute, as the small brigade of vehicles—the armored vans, the black sedans with government plates—appears at the end of her block with their headlights off. She lives in a wooded neighborhood, each house set back on a half-acre lot. There are no streetlights, no sidewalks. The vehicles purr to a stop. Their doors swing open but do not close. Any noise that might bring Claire to the window—the stomp of boots along the asphalt, the clatter of assault rifles and ammunition clips—is muffled by the steady snowfall, a white shroud thrown over the night.

She doesn’t know about the Tall Man—in the black suit and black necktie, his skull as hairless as a stone—who stands next to his black Lincoln Town Car. She doesn’t know that he has his hands tucked into his pockets or that the snow is melting against his scalp and dripping down his face or that he is smiling slightly.