Red Moon (37 page)

P
ATRICK SITS
upon the skull, as solid as stone. A few minutes ago he finished eating the gamey meat cooked to a char by Pablo and now he can think more clearly. He did not come halfway around the world and sign away his life for four years to die or become indentured to a mutt like Austin. His father is not capable of helping him. He is broken in more ways than one. That is clear to Patrick, and for now their roles have been reassigned: he will make the decisions.

So though he might want more than anything to shrink himself down to a black speck absent of any thought or will and let the wind carry him away to some other location where he might take root and start over, he knows he needs to act. He thinks about running, bolting from his seat, seeing how far he can make it, but he realizes that beyond the reach of the fire, inside the cave, where days become one endless night, other senses take over—smell, touch, especially hearing—and these men know the dark and know this space and will pursue and overtake him readily. So he will have to find another way.

“Dad?”

His father does not shift his gaze from the fire when he says, “What?”

“I know about Mom.”

“I figured that might happen.”

“And I know about what you were doing.”

His father looks at him then, and his eyes seem to brighten, though it could simply be the fire’s reflection.

“How far are we from Tuonela, Dad?”

His father’s voice hardly registers as a whisper, and Patrick isn’t sure if he says, “Not so far” or “Not so fast.” He reaches into his breast pocket then and fumbles out a black moleskin notebook. “Here. Take this.”

Patrick tucks it into the same pocket that holds the printed, folded-up sheets he brought from the base. “If I could help, Dad. What else could I do? What should I do? To help?”

His father leans toward him, but jerks back when Austin says, “What are you talking about?” He sits away from the fire, his back propped against the wall, a ceramic jug resting beside him. “No secrets.” His mouth hangs open and a filament of spit hangs between his lips. “No secrets, not here.”

Patrick stares into the fire and feels something combust inside him, as if his chest were a wet bale of straw with smoke billowing from it. Soon he will be ablaze.

Austin clears his throat with a cough. He is filthy, yet he neatens the wrinkles out of his sleeve now and plucks from it a hair or a pine needle. “You’re not going anywhere, you know.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Can’t risk it.”

“I won’t tell.”

“Saying it twice don’t make it true.”

“I can take my father off your hands. I can send word to your families that you’re still alive. You can trust me.”

Austin uses two hands to take a pull from the sloshing jug. Spirits likely stolen from some outbuilding or back porch. “Can’t trust nobody. The world is a sewer of lies. We’re all up to our necks in the sweet shit of it.” Here he raises his pointer finger and his voice takes on a high, halting quality, mimicking the current president. “We’re rebuilding a road—we’re bombing a compound. Lycans can live responsibly if given the chance—lycans must be choke collared and medicated and treated like the dogs that they are. All men are created equal—but lycans are not men. They are and are not of the same species, so the same rights do not apply.”

“Letting me go would be the right thing to do.”

“Your father always said you were never a good listener. This is what you need to start getting through your head: we’re in the same hole now. I didn’t invite you here. You showed up.”

Patrick can think of a hundred wrong things to say but doesn’t. For a minute the only sound is that of the fire snapping and pitch pockets popping. Ash spins upward and Patrick follows it with his gaze and sees that the skylight still glows. He could have been here an hour or a hundred hours for all he can tell.

Pablo says, “You going to hog that thing all day? Pass the jug around, show some manners.”

Austin takes another pull and rises with a double snap of his knees. He tries to hide it, but Patrick notices him stagger on his way to the fire. His clothes droop off him as if he were a hanger. The seat of his pants has been mended with a wide patch of fur and it gives him a diaperish look.

Patrick takes a quick inventory of his surroundings. His father is watching him. The black man’s chest is rising and falling with the rhythms of sleep. The M57 is tilted against the wall with no one there to guard it. Austin plops the jug into Pablo’s lap and announces he’s going to take a leak and trips twice on his way to the edge of the chasm with the bridge reaching across it. A moment later, the sound of his piss splattering into the void.

“Patrick?” his father says.

“Yeah.”

Pablo guzzles from the jug and scrunches up his face and shivers away the taste.

“You want to help?”

“Yeah?”

“Do what I’ve been telling you all along. Find Neal.”

Pablo wipes his mouth with his wrist and passes the jug to Patrick. The jug is ceramic, the size of a milk jug, a two-toned brown spotted with guano. Its mouth is as wide as his own and the odor of spoiled potatoes comes from it. He feels sickened. He feels the snow of the Republic weighing him down and he feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp’s nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole.

Patrick asks, in as calm a voice as he can muster, whether he can bum a cigarette.

Pablo fingers the pack in his pocket. “I don’t know, man. Only got a few.” Then he hands one over anyway.

Patrick burns its tip in the fire and then pinches it between his lips and sucks until the cherry brightens, taking care not to breathe in any of the smoke, knowing he will cough.

He looks at his father then, who nods and reaches down to claw his hands into the black sand. “Hey,” he says, “get a load of this,” and when Pablo looks at him curiously he flings two fistfuls into his face.

Pablo bring his hands to his eyes and Patrick grips the jug by the neck and leaps over the sitting stones and stumbles ten paces to where the M57 waits for him.

His father is dragging himself around the fire, toward Pablo, trying to get to him before it is too late. But it is too late. Pablo blearily reaches for his spear and lashes out with it, catching Patrick’s father in the face with it, then the base of his neck, then his chest, stabbing, stabbing. His father, who has seemed all this time an apparition, now bleeds and screams, terribly alive in this final moment.

But Patrick cannot stop. He can hear the footsteps pounding toward him and by the time he pulls the rifle to his shoulder, it is almost too late. Austin’s face is a rictus of startled fury, his teeth bared and already bleeding. He does not move smoothly, the transformation shuddering its way through him, as if he is succumbing to some toxin. His arms are outstretched to draw Patrick into the kind of crushing embrace that would snap his ribs and branch them through the pink pits of his lungs.

If the safety were engaged, Patrick would have been dead. But Austin is no longer subject to protocol. The trigger snaps. The rifle quakes. Orange light spits from the barrel. Two rounds knock the lycan back just as he reaches the end of the muzzle. The cave fills with a thunderous crack that bottoms out into a fluttering rush that Patrick at first mistakes for the blood rushing to his ears.

But he is wrong. It is the bats.

They have been startled from their slumber and now darken the air and make a wind with their wings. Their high-pitched screeching is all around him. They are everywhere, an unstable shadow fallen from the ceiling, and he tries to fight his way through them. They batter his body and scratch at his skin and he ducks down and hurries forward. In his panic he nearly hurls the jug and fires the rifle wildly into them. He thinks he is headed for the bridge but feels lost in a black current, uncertain which way to swim to find the surface. The cave floor is uneven with bones and bedding and the occasional ankle-turning stone. He can hear the scuffling and low-throated screaming of the others and guesses that they pursue him and knows that if he faces them they will no longer be men.

He nearly steps into the chasm. At either end of the bridge, two ironwork poles jut from the stone and anchor it in place. He walks directly into one of them, the impact like a fist to the gut that sends him reeling sideways, and there it is, the edge, the yawning darkness beyond it. He steadies his balance and clambers onto the bridge and though it pains his shoulder he hurls down the jug and it shatters and splatters its foul contents across the boards.

Somehow he has managed to keep the cigarette nipped between his lips this whole time. He steps back to the swaying center of the bridge and, with the bats now swarming above and below and to either side of him, he hurls the cigarette and prays, prays, prays for the spark and the
foomp
that finally comes and spreads with a great gasp of blue flame that sends him staggering back. The bats churn away with a collective shriek, some of them too late, their bodies alight and crisping to ash even as they try to outfly the burn.

At the far side of the bridge, Patrick turns back just in time to see that the timbers and the ropes have caught and risen into a chest-high door of fire. Through it crashes a lycan, Austin. One hand is pressed to his chest where blood pumps and the other steadies his balance against the blazing ropes that he seems not to feel. Fire creeps up his legs, up his torso, but the anger or the adrenaline masks the pain and he continues forward until Patrick empties a round into his face. He collapses and the charred boards crumble against his weight and his flaming body continues downward with a comet’s tail into the chasm that turns out to be four times as deep as it is wide.

This evening a pile of dead dogs burns on the central quad. Three men wearing pillowcases over their heads unloaded the carcasses, splashed them with gasoline, and set them aflame before tearing off in a pickup with no plates.

Claire can see the heap of blackened remains—and the groundskeepers surrounding it—from the dormitory laundry, a first-floor room with six machines lining the walls and a tile floor slippery with spilled soap and two windows looking out into the darkness with snow falling like translucent shreds of rice paper.

She has her earbuds in and listens to an NPR podcast about how the lycan demonstrations will affect tomorrow’s presidential election. Darrell West, a political analyst, predicts record turnouts and a rout for Chase Williams. “He’s got it. I think he’s got it. And I also think we need to be very, very careful about the backlash that could come of this—from both sides.
Some
lycans may be pushed into aggression—and
some
nonlycans may feel they have been granted permission to, to, to—let’s say—behave unkindly.”

She does not understand people—whether infected or clean—for their capability and appetite for violence. No other organism besides a virus seems so hungry to savage everything in its way. Violence defines humanity and determines headlines and elections and borders, the whole world boiled down to who hits whom harder.

She hates how poisonous she has become in her thinking. But these past two days, since she received the package, she has felt her vision blacken at times to a level only the blind would comprehend. Everything seems overwhelmingly dark, as if her side of the world has spun away from the sun and paused in its orbit. She might go mad if not for Matthew.

He will not let her go unless he goes with her. To this she has agreed, with reluctance but also with the sweet relief of someone starved biting into a pie. He needs this day to get his affairs in order. They will leave the next morning. Now she is doing their laundry on the lower floor of the dorm. Only five thirty and already full night. It gets dark so early now. She misses the sun. Despite the ugliness of her circumstances she finds herself smiling slightly at the sight of their colored clothes mixed up in the wash with a scoop of detergent sanded over the top.

She lets the lid to the machine fall with a bang and at that moment a shadow slides by the window. She only catches a sideways glimpse but it is enough to make her put a hand to her mouth.

Slowly she approaches the window. Behind her the washing machine hisses full of water and then gurgles and lurches alive. Through the weakly falling snow she sees him, maybe ten paces away, his back to her. Spotlighted by a cone of yellow light thrown by a security lamp. He is watching the groundskeepers as they chip and dig at the dogs with shovels, load their remains into black plastic bags.

It is him. She knows it is him. She doesn’t understand why—she can’t understand what she has that he wants—but after all this time, he has found her. In her mind’s eye, she sees him where he stands—wearing a black knee-length peacoat dusted with snow along the shoulders, his hatless head an inflamed pink—and as he was more than a year ago, a lean black outline stenciled against the night her parents died.

He stands as still as the lamppost beside him and she feels certain that any second now he will turn on his heel and observe her framed in the window and reach into his coat and withdraw a pistol and from it bullets will blast and trace through the black air with lines of light like gold wires.

Instead he reaches down and scoops up a handful of snow and packs it into a snowball. But instead of throwing it, he takes a bite of it, as if it were the peeled white pulp of an apple. Then continues along the path toward central campus.

She blinks and breathes for the first time in a long time. Maybe he is not here for her after all. Maybe he is here for all of them—like some black-hooded specter shredding a scythe through wheat. Either way, she should run.

She retreats to the washer and lays her hand on it for support and feels its shushing and whispering work its way up her arm and all through her, the whispering of her parents ripped through by bullets, the whispering of Miriam, who holds out a mangled hand absent two fingers, and of Jeremy, who paces in his cell, ready to take a needle full of poison, the whispering of everyone who huddled in the central quad and stared into the cameras and dared the government to crack down on their rights. She hears the whispering and it tells her to chase the Tall Man down and knife his spine or neck. Open him up and spread him around.