Red Moon (20 page)

Her feet, once free, still feel bound, every step she takes somehow wrong. Her leg muscles are at first heavy and unresponsive, and she touches her toes and does a few lunges and jumps up and down before telling Jeremy she is ready.

In the sand their footsteps make sounds like paper shredding. She follows him through the tunnel, which forks and then forks again. She makes an effort to remember the way—in case she should ever get the opportunity to escape—left, left, for starters.

“This is home,” he says, this network of lava tubes, an underground village protected by vast rocky armor. In some places the walls glimmer and trickle, slick with moisture, and in other places they go chalky with calcite and lichen. She follows him up a kind of stairway, flattopped rocks stationed in the black sand, and the tunnel opens up into a vast chamber, as big as a ballroom. She cannot make out the ceiling—the LED lights cast an uncertain glow beyond which hangs the deepest darkness—but from it hang roots, like tentacles, hundreds of them dangling all around them. Jeremy takes hold of one and swings a few feet and trippingly looks back at her with a grin. “Try it.”

She will not.

“You’re upset at me?” he says.

“What do you think?”

“I’m sorry we’ve had to meet this way.”

She asks whose fault that is. She says he’s her uncle, but until a month ago, she didn’t even know he existed. She doesn’t know anything about him.

“That’s not my fault. That’s your parents’. They didn’t want anything to do with us, not the other way around.”

“I don’t know anything about you,” she says again, and he says, “What do you want to know?”

“Nothing,” she says, and then, “Where do you get your power? Electricity, I mean.”

“That’s what you want to know? Where we get our power?”

It is. So he explains how the dams on the Columbia River produce electricity that gets outsourced to California. Many high-
voltage
and secondary lines are strung across the Cascades, and no, to answer her question, it’s not possible to tap into a twenty-five-thousand-volt structure to run computers or small appliances. Power is stepped down as it goes to homes through multiple levels of transformers that lower the voltage. Less than a half mile away from where they stand, there is a PacifiCorp maintenance shed with a residential transformer in it that brings the voltage down to 120. “That’s our keg to tap.”

Claire asks what if PacifiCorp detects a power drain, what if they get caught?

“That won’t happen,” he says. “Because we work for PacifiCorp. Just as we work for UPS and the Port Authority and Nosler and Union Pacific and American Airlines.” He lists off names and holds out a finger for each one until he runs out of fingers. He smiles when he says, “We’re everywhere.”

They move through the roots, brushing them aside, some of them as thickly clustered as hair. They approach a brightly lit chamber. Voices mutter from it, voices that go silent when they enter, ducking their heads through the low entryway. The room, twenty yards in circumference, is shaped like a dome. The floor is a mess of black and white cords that vine from tables crowded with desktop and laptop computers, printers, a scanner, a blinking green modem and wireless transmitter. A map of the country hangs on the wall right next to a map of Oregon, with different colored pins quilling them both. White Christmas lights are strung overhead in an impression of a starlit sky.

Ten men, seated at computer terminals or standing around a table littered with paper, are staring at them. At Claire. Some of them are as pale and swollen as grubs, and some of them are leathery and appear clownish in their mismatched clothing, a too-large Gap shirt and pants sewn out of doeskin and stitched with sinew.

“The latest?” Jeremy says.

One of the pale men, dressed in a Darth Vader sweatshirt and blue jeans, says, “Problem solved.” His eyes flicker to her and back to Jeremy. “Freight from Canada is delayed but on its way. We’ve got a truck on standby at the intermodal rail yard. He’ll meet us at the farm in Sandy. We won’t have long to get ready.”

“Then we better get moving.”

She filters out the rest of the conversation—because nearby, peeking from beneath a pile of paper, she has spotted a pair of scissors. She tries to be casual when she rests her flattened hand on the table. She thinks about lurching forward, grabbing the scissors, swinging them into Jeremy’s temple. Then she spots a web hanging between two computers, a spider balanced in the center of it like the pupil of an eye watching her. So she swings the scissors, and then what? And then what would she do? They would have her on the floor within seconds. She creeps her hand around the blade and secrets it up her sleeve. She can be patient.

Another minute and Jeremy leads Claire from the room—down a corridor lined with yellowed newspaper clippings that flap and whisper with their passing. She glances at the headlines. “Terror in the Air,” they read. “Hundreds Dead.” “Nation of Fear.” “Lycan Uprising.” She slows when she spots the front page of
USA Today
. “Miracle Boy” is the headline, and below it she spots a familiar face. The boy, Patrick.

She nearly cries out to him, like a friend spotted in an unfamiliar city. He is surrounded by police who usher him toward an ambulance. He is staring directly at the camera, staring directly at her. A spot of mold darkens one of his eyes.

“What are you planning?” Claire says.

Jeremy keeps walking, not looking back at her when he says, “You’ll know soon enough. Along with everyone else.”

“Is something wrong?” Patrick says. He doesn’t know what else to say. He has to say something—has to break the long silence that hangs between them, Max on one side of the coulee, him on the other.

No response outside of an unblinking stare. Maybe his words were lost, carried away by the rushing water, the wind whining through the trees. Maybe he is jumping to conclusions. Maybe Max doesn’t know what Malerie said he knows.

“Is something wrong?” Max finally says. “Is lying wrong? Is betrayal wrong? Is fucking somebody else’s girlfriend wrong?”

Patrick has never heard him swear before, so the word seems as sharp as a sword. “We never did that.”

“You did enough!” Max screams this, his voice filling up the forest, drawing from it other figures, the Americans. They step from behind trees, their eyes hooded, their boots dragging through the pine needles. “Half-breed.”

“I’m not a lycan.” He realizes this will make no difference to them, realizes they have already made up their minds to hate him, but he can’t stop himself, as if to affirm his identity. “She was bitten after I was born.”

“That still makes you a son of a bitch.” Max points his rifle at him.

He raises his own in defense. They have brought him here to hurt him. Deep in the woods. A place where no one will hear him scream. A place where he will never be found. He isn’t sure what they are capable of—but he is about to learn.

Max keeps his eyes on Patrick but speaks to the others. “He hasn’t reloaded. Get to him before he does.”

They leap off the ledge and kick their way down the hill and splash through the stream and scramble up the other side, moving steadily toward him, and all the while Patrick stands there, as frozen as the deer in the river, too tired to run, too tired to do anything but ratchet the breech and eject the cylinder, not bothering to reload. “I’m sorry about Malerie,” he says.

“Too late for sorry.”

The boys close the distance quickly, clambering over the lip of the coulee, racing in his direction with their arms out. He can’t fight them—there are too many and their punishment will be that much more severe if he puts up a struggle—so he tosses the rifle aside and crouches down in a ball and they are on top of him. He is ready for the pain. Their fists and their boots thudding against his spine and ribs, his ass, the back of his head. First the impact, then the bruised heat that follows, until his entire body feels inflamed, every throb like an ember glowing orange beneath his skin.

Somehow, through the tangle of bodies, he makes out Max on top of him. His belly is soft and damp, like a pillow soaked with water. His voice pants in his ear. “We could kill you, you know. Say it was an accident. No one would know. Maybe I’d even speak at your funeral, run a hand along your coffin, which would be closed of course, since your skull would be split open like a cantaloupe.”

Somebody punches him in the ear, a hand as hard as a sledgehammer. A steady rain of black spots falls along the edges of his vision, and he ends up on his back—staring through the animal bodies looming over him—staring at the sky beyond them, where jets rumble and their contrails crisscross the pale blue like badly cast fishing lines across the surface of a lake.

He wishes them safe travels.

Jeremy shows her a room with a groined ceiling. Three moldy couches are arranged around an old wood-paneled television with a VCR and DVD player stacked on top of it. And then they walk past a sleeping chamber full of cots and a supply room busy with bags and boxes and crates, some arranged on shelves, some heaped and scattered on the floor. The tang of gun oil hangs in the air.

The kitchen is a space similar to the computer lab. Six mismatched lamps are staggered through the chamber to give off enough light to cook by. A skinned headless deer hangs from a rope, turning slowly, the rope creaking and knotted through its hind hock. The scent of blood comes off it and she resists the peculiar desire to slide a finger along the haunch and lick it.

Next to the deer sits a dented gas stove with a dirty propane tank hosed up behind it. And then a woodstove piped out through a crack in the wall, some other channel that sucks away the smoke. Several folding tables are pushed against the walls, their tops cluttered with cutting boards and knife blocks and cutlery jars packed with spatulas and wooden spoons like vases full of flowers. An old yellow fridge hums in the corner, surrounded by stand-alone cabinets, many of them without doors, their insides jammed with pans, pots, glasses, plates, spices.

Claire notices a trickling sound and goes to it, a spring dribbling from a hole in the wall and pooling in a rock basin the size of a bathtub. Jeremy kneels down and unhooks a ladle with a screened filter and dips it into the spring. He drinks from it and dips it again and asks, “You thirsty?”

She is more than thirsty, her lips cracked and peeling, and she nods and brings her mouth greedily to the ladle, the same place his mouth had been. She fills it four times before she nods to him and their tour resumes.

“Who’s Balor?” she says.

“Where did you hear that name?”

She shrugs. “Who is he?”

“Tell me about your aunt.”

“Your wife.”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want me?”

“Because I want her. She’ll come for you. Can you tell me about her?”

“I’m guessing she’s a whole lot of pissed off and worried sick right now.”

“I’m counting on that,” he says. “I’m hoping we’ll be seeing her soon.”

She can feel a breeze now, as they move up an incline, the floor a jumble of boulders. They hold out their arms for balance and leap from rock to rock, moving upward, the air steadily growing brighter.

“She hasn’t mentioned anything about the police?”

“Why would she?”

“Going to them, talking to them? She hasn’t mentioned that?”

“She just wants to be alone. You should leave her alone. Why do you want her anyway?”

“I need her. A wife should be with her husband.” He blinks rapidly, and then his voice grows louder and hurried as if to overwhelm what he has already said. “And she’s an important part of what we’re doing here. She’s an important part of the revolution.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”

“We’re the revolution.” He slips on a slick rock and catches himself with his hands and scrambles to right himself. “We’re the leather-fringe revolutionaries fighting against the blood-coat British. We’re the blacks boycotting the buses in Montgomery. We’re the fist-pumping protesters who took over Tahir Square. This is grassroots democracy.”

Claire realizes the illogic of what he’s saying—a true democracy would leave Miriam alone if she voted to separate herself from the group—just as she realizes the brokenhearted can create any sort of justification, can make sense out of no sense. His daughter died. His wife abandoned him. He wants to fill up the emptiness he feels. Claire can relate.

But she is also a teenager, so she views everything through a cynical lens, and she finds it annoying that he is costuming his desire to regain his wife with political zealotry. He sounds like an actor reciting lines he hasn’t quite mastered. She can’t hold back the sarcasm. “Did you say democrazy?”

He frowns and stops climbing and stares until her eyes drop. “Are you making a joke?” he says and she senses for the first time how he could be dangerous to her if pushed too far.

“You kill people.”

He takes a step toward her, stepping across a black gap of air, onto her boulder, less than a foot between them, but she doesn’t back down. She can feel his breath on her when he says, “People die. That’s what they do.”

“Like your daughter.”

He hits her openhanded. She doesn’t see it coming—the slap hard—a sting followed by a swelling flush. She imagines, on her cheek, the white shape of a hand blooming bright red.

His eyes, at first black slits, soften. He hangs his head and turns away and continues to climb upward. “Come on,” he says, and, after a moment, she follows, her hand holding the place his had been.

The air brightens. The incline flattens and they come to a door made of cross-stitched nylon rope—messy with browned vines—that parts like a curtain. This is one of four entrances, he says, and the netting provides camouflage and blocks the worst of the wind but also keeps the cave system breathing. “Essential, considering the smell the raggedy lot of us gives off.” His voice full of humor, as if what happened a moment before did not.

Outside the sun is red and the trees are black. Dawn. She has lost all sense of time underground. She tries to take in as much of her surroundings as she can. A tangle of manzanita, stacks of lichen-encrusted rocks, a valley shoulder busy with scree. They are high up, near a lava cone frosted with snow, the Cascades rising jaggedly behind them. She imagines, at night, she would be able to distinguish—in the distance—some town, the faraway grid of streetlights. But now, squinting against the rising sun, she can distinguish nothing but hundreds of miles of woods that eventually give way to a wash of desert.