Red Moon (35 page)

P
ATRICK HAS NO CHOICE
but to do as they tell him. Right now that means kicking through ice-scabbed snow that sometimes softens and rises into belly-deep drifts. They have been trudging along for more than an hour. The sun makes everything a blinding white. His legs throb along with his shoulder. He feels feverish despite the cold. Every now and then he scoops a handful of snow to his mouth and chews it down to water.

This morning, when the sun flamed pink rafters across the sky, when his father called out to him, the lycans wrestled away his pistol and patted him down and then left him to stand there dumbly while they gutted and quartered and skinned the moose, severed the head and tossed it aside. This took more than an hour, and during this hour, he and his father sat on a log and looked at each other, simply looked at each other. At first his father smiled, marveling at their reunion, and then the smile died and he took on the startled, resigned expression of a man leaning over his own child’s coffin. “I’ve wished all this time to see you,” he said. “And now I wish I hadn’t.” In the clearing the carcass steamed and the blood stained the snow and made it appear as though they were wading through a red pond. The steaming pile of viscera, purple and red and green, drew crows that cawed and busied the ground with their spinning shadows.

Now the lycans drag two sleds made of branches lashed together with rope and sinew. They use their spears as walking sticks. One of them carries an M57 over his shoulder. Another carries Patrick’s father. They wear their uniforms, but they are not soldiers, not anymore. They do not walk in formation, but in a huddle the shape of a dog’s paw, with Patrick at the center.

Eventually, along a wooded hillside crowned by a granite and gneiss cliff, they enter a bombed-out village made mostly of stone and cement houses with the roofs collapsed in. The snow here is packed down, threaded with footsteps, stained with urine and blood and feces.

From the base of the cliff grows a church, square and built from blocks of granite. A broken cross rises from its roof. A crow roosts on it and departs when they draw near. A splintered door rests against the entryway, no longer hinged, and they drag it aside and then pack snow onto the meat and heave up the sleds to carry inside.

A stone cistern for holy water lies cracked on the floor. The pews are gone—smashed up for kindling, Patrick guesses—and the roof has collapsed in places and snow has fallen through these skylights and made slick the slate floor. Roots break through the walls and cling to the stone.

They walk past the pulpit and through a doorway that leads to a rectory with candled recesses in the walls and a skeleton in the corner with a moldering Bible in its lap. The light is dim and the lycan carrying his father sparks a Zippo to an iron-handled torch and continues down a hallway and Patrick hangs back and watches the light swirl away like water down a drain before somebody gives him a nudge and he starts forward.

They walk through a crypt stacked with skulls and femurs threaded with cobwebs and rotten gray cloth. The tunnel then opens into a wider passage and they pass over a chasm on a wood bridge with iron trappings, maybe ten feet long, that Patrick can feel bow in its middle.

On the other side, they enter a high-ceilinged chamber with a small skylight far above and with some heathen altar at its center and with bedding along the floor made from animal skins and pine boughs. A fire pit glows orange with embers and the lycans throw more wood on it from a tall stack along the wall. The flames soon rise and pock their faces with shadows and make their expressions seem to move even when still.

They pull off their shawls. They are all windburned, their skin darkened in patches from frostbite and brightened in others by burst capillary rosettes. Their breath floats around their heads like lost souls while the flames gather higher and higher and the cavern comes into flickering existence around them. The ceiling is blackened from the smoke of so many cooking fires and from the hundreds of bats that roost there. The walls are smeared with murals depicting men killing animals and animals killing men, battles fought yesterday and today and tomorrow, a battle that has never and will never cease, killing for hunger and killing for thirst, the special sort of thirst slaked by blood.

The floor is black sand clotted with guano. There are sitting stones around the fire pit and the bleached skull of some giant animal Patrick does not recognize, and he sits upon its crown. His father is set down beside him. His legs end in stumps at the knees, so that he appears half-buried, half-lost to the underworld.

Patrick studies each of their faces. A black man named Jessie with half his teeth missing. A Mexican named Pablo with a dent in his forehead as if somebody jammed a thumb into mud. A white guy with a beard and a flat face with bulging eyes that seem never to settle anywhere more than a second.

His name is Austin. He is the one who stripped Patrick of his gun, who laughed when Patrick embraced his father and said, “Well, isn’t that the sweetest fucking thing.”

In the clearing his father explained what happened to them. The ambush on a routine patrol. An IED ripped through their convoy—the day bright blue one moment, red with fire the next—and before they could register what happened, out of the roiling smoke came what must have been ten or twenty or thirty lycans. “We sprayed off all our ammo,” his father said. “We made a storm cloud out of the street, but there were too many of them. They wanted to bite—that’s what they wanted. To bite us. And they bit us, some worse than others.” He unrolled his sleeve then and held out a forearm branded with scar tissue. “Mission accomplished.”

Five of them came out alive, all of them bitten, one of them without any legs. The blast shredded them, and the men cut away the remains and cauterized the ruined flesh with a hubcap they stuck in a roaring fire until the metal glowed orange.

Austin broke into their conversation. “Everybody talks about the
what if
moment. What if you get dog bit? Some say put a bullet in your head. Some say make do with life as an infected. We all got wives, kids. MIA or KIA and your family keeps the stipend. Go home a lycan? Then fucking what? Discharged. Divorced. Doped up and ruined.” Behind Austin, in the clearing, the moose sobbed and tried once more to struggle upright, and he used Patrick’s pistol to fire two rounds into it and the moose dropped as if a string had been cut. “Fuck that.”

Now, in the cave, Patrick says nothing but watches the lycans and listens to their voices echoing and their footsteps hushing through sand and their knives sharpened over stone. They unload the meat from the sled and stack it on the altar and begin to carve away at it with the knives that flash in each of their hands. Some of the meat they eat raw and some of it they slice into steaks and chops to then pack with snow into a recess in the cave wall, what looks like an old tomb. The air smells of blood and body odor as tangy as sour wine.

Patrick keeps wanting to ask why.
Why
had his father not escaped these men, why had he not reached out to Patrick, assured him he was alive? He already knows the answer—he is no longer their staff sergeant, now their prisoner, the same as Patrick—but it’s the wrong answer.

Pablo kneels by the fire and reaches into it to light a cigarette. His hands are gloved with blood and his mouth smeared with it. The dent in his forehead carries a black shadow. He makes eye contact with Patrick and drags hard on the cigarette and blows a cloud of bluish smoke and says his father is a good man.

His voice is high and Patrick realizes then how young Pablo is, how young they all are, only a few years older than he. But the weather has scoured age into their faces. “Sorry as hell you had to find out about him like this. But hey, at least he’s living, right?”

Austin stands at the altar and thrusts and saws with his knife. He pops a ribbon of meat into his mouth and speaks around it. “Call this living, I’d rather be dying.”

Pablo takes another hit off his cigarette and flicks it at Austin and it sparks off his cheek and Austin swipes at the burn and bugs his eyes and tromps over to where the M57 leans against the wall and racks a round in the chamber and holds it to Pablo’s head. “Do that again.”

“Only got a few cigs left or I might.”

Austin keeps a bead on Pablo, aiming for the hole already begun in his forehead. Then he says, “Fuck yourself,” and lowers the rifle and returns it to its place against the wall and once again snatches up his blade and goes to work on a haunch striated with bands of fat.

Patrick looks at his father, and his father looks at him, then drops his eyes, defeated. He has no say among these men, no power to keep the peace, offer any direction, save his son.

One of the sleds sits near Pablo and he leans over and rips away a fist-size section of meat and jabs it onto a spear and swings it toward Patrick and says, “Hungry, man?”

“Don’t give him that,” Austin says.

“It’s Keith’s kid, man.”

“Don’t give him that spear.”

“Four of us, one of him. How big you think his balls are?”

Austin looks at Patrick, talks to Pablo. “He can eat. He can’t have the spear.”

Pablo lets the spear hang in the air a moment more—so that Patrick could reach for it if he wanted—and then drags it back and balances it on his thigh and hovers the meat near the coals. Blood drips from it, sizzles. “You know your old man tells some crazy stories.”

“Yeah?”

“Telling us stories how he dropped acid in Yosemite once and went on a hike. Tripping balls and thought, for some reason, might be a good idea to take off his clothes. So he does. So he’s hiking along naked except for his boots. Then he comes across this woman wearing, like, some gauzy white outfit. Most beautiful woman in the world, he said. He touched her and she turned to ash when he touched her and blew away with the wind.”

“That true, Dad?”

His father does not respond. His head is bowed and he is rubbing his hands along his thighs to their rounded ends.

Patrick smiles because it seems like the right thing to do. Even if he doesn’t feel happy, he doesn’t feel sad either. He doesn’t feel much of anything except cornered. He doesn’t think he has room for anything else inside his head except escape. He studies his purplish knuckles, the blue-veined backs of his hands, as if they might hold an answer for him.

The black man, Jessie, says, “Why you telling him that?”

“Trying to make conversation.”

“You’re supposed to be telling him some heroic shit. Not about some drug trip. Nobody wants to hear that about their dad.” Then he says he needs some rack time and settles onto some bedding and rolls away from them.

The meat begins to char and smoke and Patrick eyes up the M57 leaning against the cave wall, only ten feet away but on the other side of the fire. He doesn’t know how many bullets are in it, but he guesses there are enough. His eyes jog to Austin, who remains hunched over the altar, shirtless now, his arms sleeved in blood up to the elbows. Their gazes lock. There is no negotiating with him. There is no escape either. If Patrick tries to leave, he will be dead or infected. He can see the sharpness in Austin’s stare and knows it is only a matter of time before he tells the others to hold Patrick down and gnaw on his thigh or take him up the ass.

After Claire ripped open the envelope and held the ziplock bag in her hand and recognized the two fingers sliced off neatly at the knuckle and dropped the mess of it to the floor and retreated until her back hit the wall, it took a long time for her to stop screaming. Matthew at first tried to comfort her, whispering that it would be all right, and then clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her outside, where the cold snapped her into silence.

She could not be alone—and she could not face Andrea, who would have too many questions Claire could not answer—so she would go to his room. “Is that okay?” he asked and she nodded until he stopped her chin with his hand and said, “Okay.” He retrieved the envelope from the floor of the mailroom and shoved it in her bag and she felt sick with the weight of it when they set off into the twilight gloom.

In his room, a single, he apologizes for the mess and kicks a pile of dirty clothes into his closet. His shelves and desk are overflowing with textbooks and papers, coffee cups, a hacky sack, a half-eaten bag of Fritos, a troll doll with wild hair. Over his bed hang two posters, one of
Star Wars
, the other of Che Guevara. A minifridge hums in the corner and from it he pulls a bottle of springwater for her to guzzle, dried out as she feels from so much crying.

In the window sits an iPod dock and a globe that lights up from inside. She goes to it and snaps it on and it projects its colorful design onto the window, the walls, their faces. She twirls it and the room spins with color. “Where do you want to go?” he says and she slams down a finger, and when they see where she points, their faces fall with disappointment: the Lupine Republic.

She leans into him then and he wraps his arms around her and she studies their reflection in the window. Her eyes strain to focus on him, her mouth opening and closing, as though she is struggling to read in dim light. She can’t quite tell if he’s looking back at her or past her. They remain this way for some time and later retain much the same position in bed.

The next morning’s sunrise feels like an ignition. She has to leave. It is impossible not to leave. Not with what she knows. She slips out of bed and shoulders her backpack and clicks shut the door, and five minutes later creeps into her own room, where Andrea still sleeps.

Claire sets her suitcase on the bed and flops it open and begins to empty her drawers. She will depart on the next train to Seattle. No good-byes. No regrets. Before, she chastised herself for her preoccupation with the past, thinking of it as a weakness. Now she feels furious at herself for being so neglectful. Her past is all that matters—and Miriam is the only part of it that remains.

She checks her bureau, checks her desk, making sure she has everything she needs, and finds there a paper graded by Reprobus. The paper about her father. She received a B-plus on it, and in his end comments he wrote, “More sources next time. Interested in hearing from others besides you alone. The wolf, remember, is only as strong as the pack.”