Red Moon (21 page)

“Where are we?”

He looks at her with eyes the same color as the winter sky above them. “Your new home.”

Max picks up Patrick’s rifle and tests its weight in his hands as if it were a baseball bat. Then he swings into a tree, once, twice, three times, the bark chipping away, revealing the pulpy yellow wood beneath—and the rifle shatters, the stock splinters.

Patrick does not so much as lift his head in protest, his cheek to the forest floor, one of his eyes swollen to a slit. His mouth is full of blood and his tongue feels like an eel twisting around in it. Everything hurts, his entire body a pulsing wound. A headache tightens like a hot belt around his skull.

Max kicks at the remains of the rifle and shakes off the pain in his hands, and then, after one final withering glance at Patrick, he heads back the way they came with the other boys trailing him. One of them asks, “What about the deer?” and Max says, “Let it rot.”

Patrick lays there a long time, feeling sorry for himself, caught up equally in the pain and humiliation of the moment. The woods seem suddenly leached of color, a nearby pine gray and gaunt and pocked with woodpecker burrows.

They have abandoned him here. A ten-mile hike from the nearest asphalt road, and from there, forty miles or more to Old Mountain. But he is alive. He rolls onto his side, bringing his knees to his chest, and imagines the bruises darkening his skin. He breathes through the pain in his ribs and listens to the trickle of the stream and the far cry of an owl.

Then he hears what he at first mistakes for the blood-pounding pulse in his ears—footsteps. Moving toward him. The Americans returning to finish him off. He lifts his head and blinks away the blood that films his vision and still he cannot make sense of what he sees. Walking along the edge of the coulee, a woman in full-body camouflage, Miriam.

“You’re not dead anyway.” She holds out a hand. “Come on. Get up.”

S
OMETHING IS HAPPENING
. When Jeremy escorts her back to her cell—she isn’t sure what else to call it, the dark sandy recess she is consigned to—men rush through the underground passages, many of them speaking into walkie-talkies, one of them carrying a tangle of cords and video equipment, another huffing along with an oil-stained cardboard box that rattles in his arms. Jeremy says things to them—like “Go time” and “Let’s do this”—and in their passing he pats them on the back or grips their shoulders.

Then, when the two of them descend the staircase, the corridor curls around a corner and she sees him, Puck. Unlike the others, he is not moving. He is leaning against the wall, hands in his pockets, with no other task except to wait for them. “I was told I won’t be joining you in the field,” he says, his voice as high-pitched as a bat’s screech. “I was told I would be staying behind.”

That stops Jeremy, who—head down, lost in his thoughts—hadn’t yet noticed Puck. “Your work is here.”

“You’re punishing me? For the hot springs? Because I didn’t ask for your
approval
?” This last word said with more than a little venom.

Jeremy looks at Claire, looks at Puck, and says, “We’ll talk about this later.” He starts down the staircase again, and Claire reluctantly follows, crossing her arms, walking directly behind Jeremy as if he were a blind. She feels electricity in the air, the crackling possibility of violence.

The corridor is thin and Puck does not move to accommodate them, so that Jeremy and then Claire have to brush against him, and when she does, she feels as she might when brushing up against a lightning-scarred tree, the char rubbing off on her, staining her with its shadow. She tries to keep her head down but can’t help glancing his way, and when she does, he slides his tongue between his teeth and bites down.

Patrick isn’t sure what it is, maybe the sight of the knives on the counter or the pistol holstered around her shoulder, but he can’t help asking, “You’re not bad, are you?” The most childish question in the world, he knows.

“No,” Miriam says. “Are you?”

He can’t tell for sure, since her back is to him, but he thinks he detects a smile in her voice. He is in her cabin once again, feeling no less like a prisoner than last time, but something has changed, her attitude toward him softer. He sits at a round wooden kitchen table and she stands at the sink, wearing camo pants and a black tank top that reveals black wings tattooed across her shoulders, their color the color of her hair.

Next to the table sits an openmouthed trash bag full of driver’s licenses. A dozen of them, like a strewn deck of cards, are spread across the table, all bearing photos of young women who look an awful lot like Claire.

Miriam fills a bowl with hot soapy water and carries it steaming to the table. She sweeps away the licenses and arranges a chair opposite him and dips a washcloth into the bowl and wrings it out with a splash. “Hold still,” she says and begins to clean him. The washcloth is as rough as a cat’s tongue. He closes his eyes and tries not to wince at the pressure against his swollen, cracked skin. All the while she hums, something barely audible, a lullaby. Before long the water in the bowl is flat and pink. She pats him dry with a hand towel and then unpeels several Band-Aids to hold together the places his skin split.

He has his arm wrapped tightly around his chest, hugging his ribs. “Better take off your shirt,” she says, and he tries, but it hurts too much to lift his arms over his head. She helps him peel away the shirt to reveal a torso colored with angry red welts, a purplish black bruise along his rib cage.

He can see in her fingernails the telltale thickness of a lycan. He remembers Max talking about that, about the different ways you could detect infection, and fingernails were one of them, as thick as teeth, as thick as bone. His mother’s are not so noticeable since she keeps them painted and filed. He can feel her nails on his skin now when she runs a hand along his ribs. “Maybe broken,” she says, “maybe not. Either way, you’ll live.” She retrieves a bottle of ibuprofen from the bathroom and rattles out four pills, which he swallows with a tall glass of water.

Then she asks if he is ready to listen and he says he supposes so. She begins to talk. “Some of this you might already know. Some of this you will not.” The light shifts and the shadows darken, when she tells him at length about the Resistance, about their ideology and activity over the past few decades, about her abandonment of them, about their harassment and the eventual kidnapping, the place in the snow where Claire’s tracks ended, taken over by an abominably larger set she recognized.

“The bad guys,” he says.

“Definitely the bad guys,” she says.

“Did they leave you a note?”

“They didn’t need to leave me a note. I know where to find them and their message was clear. Come back to us. Or else.”

She tells him she was scouting the woods near their hideout when she heard the gunshot, when she found him enclosed in a knot of bodies. She tells him she plans to return there. She tells him that they will be expecting her and that there are many of them, but despite this, despite their force, she will get Claire back. And she tells him, finally, that he is going to help her.

“How soon are we going to do this?”

“We are going to do this now.”

He feels afraid, very much so, but that is not why he hesitates. He hesitates because he has not said anything about the plane attacks and wonders if he should, wonders if she was somehow involved despite her disavowal. And he hesitates, too, because the beating has left him weak and addled. He worries he’ll be useless. When he squeezes his hands into fists, they tremble like tools capable of breaking down when he needs them most.

Miriam is leaning toward him, her arms resting on her thighs. Her face is so pointed it is like its own kind of weapon. “You care about her?”

He is surprised by how automatic his response is. “Yes.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t have come back for her, right? You wouldn’t have gone for your little walk in the woods if you didn’t feel something for her, right?”

Her voice and expression are so stony he can’t tell whether she is messing with him or not. “Right.”

“I want you to know that she’s not safe. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that something will happen to her.”

He tries to harden his face when he says, “Okay,” but really he feels small enough to put in his own pocket. The whole world seems suddenly against him, and he doubts, when he thinks of the Americans in town, or the lycans in the mountains, that he is up to the fight. His headache, at least, is fading to a hum, the ibuprofen numbing him.

Her hand drops to the table and caresses the pistol. “You know how to use one of these?”

“A little.” Never pistols, only revolvers and rifles really, hunting deer or blasting pop bottles at the rock quarry.

She thumbs the safety off, then on. Ejects the magazine and slams it back home. “Seventeen rounds, double-stack magazines. Keep track. Finger on the guard unless you’re ready to kill. Otherwise, bam, bam.”

She rises and returns with two Magnum flashlights, two penlights, four folding knives with Teflon grips, a sheathed machete, a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, stacking them on the table. She goes to the cupboard next to the stove as if to withdraw a pot but instead grabs a half dozen clips of ammo. Then she creaks open the hall closet and pulls from the shelves several holsters, each with a backing plate of saddle leather, worn tucked inside the waistband.

She tells him to stand up and he does, still shirtless. Without asking for help, she grabs his belt and loosens it by two notches to accommodate the holsters, one on either hip, the pistol butts facing forward for a cross-arm draw.

She stares at him for a long while and sighs, as if finally recognizing him for the kid he feels like. “Let me put on some coffee,” she says. “Sharpen us up.”

Outside, the paling sky has the look of a watercolor. She hand-grinds beans and fills a kettle with water to set on the stove while he experiments with the pistols, unlimbering them from their holsters, holding them out before him, like the gunslingers in the movies; only his arms waver no matter how hard he tries to keep them steady. It’s more than the pain in his ribs—like a knife wound—it’s the weakness he feels.

He thinks of Claire, huddled somewhere in the dark, and imagines her face turning toward him with relief. That numbs his pain more than the drugs breaking down inside him. He saved her once; he will save her again.

The stove
tick-tick-ticks
as the burner fails to catch. The smell of natural gas sours the air.

Patrick says, “So they’ve taken her because of you?”

The stove continues to tick like a bomb, and she curses under her breath and opens a drawer and knocks open a box of matches. “Yes.”

“Why do they want you back so badly?”

She strikes a match and drops it on the burner and a blue flare the size of a child
foomps
to life and knocks them back a step—and then the flame settles. “Because I’m married to one of them.”

When Jeremy tells her to please sit down, when he cuffs her wrists, when he tells her he enjoyed their little walk and asks whether she needs anything, she almost tells him about Puck, almost.

Then she realizes this is her chance. Something has been set into motion, something Puck is not a part of, something that will draw from the mountain many men, including Jeremy, who might otherwise bar her escape.

“No.” She fiddles with the cuffs and casts down her eyes in case they might reveal her excitement. “I’m good. Thank you.”

She knows it is only a matter of time before Puck comes for her. From only a few conversations, she has gleaned that he desires her, yes—but for reasons even more complicated he will punish her as if punishing Jeremy.

Her ankles he leaves free. The scissors remain hidden up her sleeve, the blades of them cold against her forearm. She feels her pulse throbbing against the metal, counting down the seconds, the minutes, the hours, until the tunnel system goes quiet, vacated—and then, as expected, she hears the approaching footsteps, kicking through sand like a gathering whisper.

It isn’t clear where her cell begins—there is no definitive space designated as hers, no bars to peer through and knock a tin cup against. The lava tube simply ends—as if, eons ago, some large worm burrowed through the earth until it expired here, its flesh crumbling to sand, its shape remembered in the rocky husk of the tunnel. But if there were an entrance, a line within which she felt jailed, it is where Puck stands now, ten yards away, the bend in the corridor.

Neither of them says anything at first. They both know why he is there.

She can see his jaw working up and down, chewing gum, wetly mashing it with his teeth, snapping it. “It’s snowing, you know,” he finally says.

“That’s nice.” She isn’t sure what to make of this, him talking about the weather. The weather is what you talk about when there is nothing else to talk about. “I like snow.” Nothing could be further from the truth, but she tries to make her voice as sincere and pleasant as possible. She wants his guard down.

He pauses his chewing to say, “Really?” With that, he comes forward, one slow step, then another, the look on his face leading her to believe he is as surprised by what she says as by her seeming friendliness. “Most don’t.”

“This time of year, I do. Christmastime.”

“But then it gets to be too long.”

“I guess.”

His voice lowers. “Around here the winters can be very, very long.” The whites of his eyes glow, but his pupils appear as black as burrows. She feels as if she is falling into them. He has closed the distance between them by half. She is sitting on a rock the size of a buffalo skull, the closest thing she has to a seat, hunched over as if exhausted, but really, she is approximating a crouch, ready to spring forward. She tries to be casual, pretending to scratch an itch, when she pulls the scissors halfway from her sleeve, the blades now tucked sharply against her palm.

He pops his gum again, the sharp report making her flinch, reminding her of the time a boy at school came up behind her and snapped her bra. “Your bitch of an aunt isn’t going to do anything stupid, is she? Isn’t going to tuck tail to the police, spill her guts, tattle?”

“She wouldn’t do that.”

“Everyone has their breaking point.” He crouches and reaches out an arm to touch her ankle. “Pretty.”

She shivers. He’s still too far away, faster than her, stronger, and she can’t risk lunging that distance, giving him time to respond. She tries not to be bothered by his touch, but that’s like trying to hold still when a spider dashes across your face. A shiver runs through her and she pulls away her feet. “Stop.”

“Stop?” He works the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. She can smell it now, something fruity. “You think I’m going to stop? You think any of this is going to stop? We’re just getting started. And if you think I’m going to use common words—like ‘You better obey me’ and ‘You ought to treat me with respect’ and ‘You better shut your mouth’—you’re mistaken. Because we don’t believe in words here. We believe in doing. I’m going to
do
things to you. That’s how you really get people to listen. You do things to them, and when those things are horrible, they listen very carefully. I want you to listen very carefully. You might think you’re being imprisoned in this far dark corner, but you’re in fact being protected. Forget about Jeremy. I am your protector. I am protecting you. All I need to do is snap my fingers and you’ll be cast out to the wolves. The wolves like to bite and they like to sodomize. You’ll feel like you’ve been turned inside out, like you’ve been fucked by a dozen swords. Maybe after they’re done with you, they’ll keep you around for another round or two, or maybe they’ll be bored and bothered by your whimpering, and if that’s the case, maybe we’ll have a bonfire, a big one. We’ll throw you in it and your skin will melt off and we’ll all laugh and howl and dance around the flames and afterward gnaw on your blackened bones. How does that sound, Claire?”