Red Moon (40 page)

At first Patrick thought nothing of the email address, but something drew him back to it. Then one day, after peeling off his rain-soaked clothes, he noticed that his socks left the red imprint of their stitching on his clam-white foot. He stared at it for a long time before retrieving a pencil and opening the notebook to its second-to-last page and rubbing the graphite softly across it. There were the words already printed there, and then there were other words scarred over the top of them, the residue of what his father had scribbled on the other page. Patrick at first thought this hopeless, the graffiti twist of letters, but then he made out a stack of words with
X
s through them: beer, yeast, California. Passwords. His father couldn’t remember his passwords, so he wrote them down. The final word in the column, the only one not crossed out, was his name, Patrick. Patrick was the password.

He had tried to email Neal Desai after he returned stateside, without success, the doctor missing, presumed dead. And he had tried to get the military and Google to hand over his father’s email accounts—but they wouldn’t until he was confirmed dead and Patrick named his inheritor.

Now he had the password—and it told him what he needed to know. It told him what he needed to do.

He turns again to check the road behind him and this time sees headlights cutting through the rain and steps off the road so that he won’t be struck. The vehicle—a van, he can now tell, one of the vans the nurses and EMTs have been using for medevac—slows as it nears him, and he throws out an arm, sticks up a thumb.

Lightning flashes and colors the world a pale blue. With the afterimage in his eyes and the rain pelting his face, he can hardly see a thing when he yanks open the door. He hears a woman’s voice yell, “Get in already,” and then, when he shakes off his poncho and pulls back the hood, “Oh.”

It takes him a minute. The darkness. The baggy uniform. The rain-swept confusion of the night. And then he notices her red hair, the color of a poisoned apple, chin length and tucked behind her ear. And she smiles, and he knows her, Malerie.

“You,” he says. He is halfway into the cab already, his foot on the railing, his hand on the dash, and he pulls back now and steps into the rain. “Second thought, I’d rather walk.”

Maybe it is the way she chases after him, maybe it is the way she fiercely apologizes and calls herself stupid, the stupidest person in the world, maybe it is the torrential downpour or the grumbling thunder or his general loneliness or the sick-scared feeling that has followed him from the bar, but he finally says all right,
all right
, and lets her give him a ride back to the base and an hour later he has her propped up on a bathroom sink and is fucking her while staring at his reflection hard in the mirror.

C
LAIRE HAS SWEAT
through her clothes digging his grave. Now she sits cross-legged against an oak and stares at the hump of dirt with the shovel stabbed into it. The shade offers no relief from the heat. Neither does the canteen of water she gulps, splashes her face with. A cloud of humidity hangs over everything, like the breath of the reactor. A bluebottle fly buzzes languidly through the air and orbits her head before settling on her wrist to drink from the sweat beading there. She watches it a moment, then crushes it with her palm, a smear of blood and black twitching legs.

She could have buried Matthew anywhere—a park, a backyard—but she chose a graveyard. With all the disorder in the world—helicopters stuttering overhead, cars rusting in the streets, neighborhoods burning, birds falling dead from the sky—she liked the order of the place and the act. Burying him here, among his fellow dead and the tidy granite headstones, felt good, felt right.

She found a place on a hill, an empty spread of grass, and stomped the blade of her shovel into it. She took her time—pressing down with her foot, leaning into the handle, sinking the blade into the soil with a slow scuff. Sweat trailed down her forehead and stung her eyes and blurred her vision of the hole growing larger and larger beneath her. The loamy, overturned earth mixed up with the smell of his pungent body. Her hands first blistered, then wept, then bled. After three hours, she had gone three feet. She tried not to look at his body when she dragged it to the edge of the hole, rolled it in with a thud. But she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that he landed facedown, his arm bent at an unnatural angle behind his back. She couldn’t let him lie like that for the rest of eternity. She dropped into the hole and, with some difficulty, flopped him over, folded his arms over his chest, where his heart was hidden. The day was hot, but he was as cool as the exposed dirt, and she fought the temptation to shove a gun in her mouth and lie down beside him. She looked at him then—saw his skin graying and swelling around the edges, saw half his face missing as if someone had taken a bite out of it—and the urge passed and she only wanted to cover him up, to forget.

Sometimes Chinook choppers buzz the sky like hornets. Sometimes they drop cartons of Volpexx and sometimes they drop bombs. Sometimes soldiers spill out of Humvees and staple posters to telephone poles and storefronts and garage doors, posters about amnesty and contamination, about what will happen to those who choose to remain behind: imprisonment, a slow death from radiation, a swift death from execution should they engage with any military personnel.

She doesn’t need a poster to tell her this. The reminders are everywhere. Bodies sit on park benches. Bodies are buckled into cars. Bodies are curled up on sidewalks. Some of them with blackened skin the wind dusts away, their carcasses nothing more than dried-out husks encasing a bundle of bones. Some of them, more freshly dead, gunshot or clawed up or bright with sores and missing clumps of hair and stinking so badly that she rarely goes a day without retching between her feet.

It is because of Matthew that she is alive and it is because of her that Matthew is dead. Five months ago, when the sky lit up, he drove them directly to the Seattle REI and hurled a rock through the window and ignored the alarm blaring while he shrugged on a backcountry pack and she did the same to fill with iodine tabs and Clif Bars and knives and matches and tents and sleeping bags and aluminum blankets and rain gear. They even got a bicycle rack and two Treks, and when she yelled, “Why?” over the alarm, he said, “For when there’s no more gas.” He understood it all so clearly, as if their story were a novel and he simply flipped to the end to see what would happen.

They should have left—with the millions of others who sought escape from a ruined world and treatment for their ruined bodies—but they hesitated. Within a day, the gas stations dried up, the freeways gridlocked, clogged with cars, many of them abandoned. The whole world deafened by sirens and horns, gunfire. Soon it was too late: she could not make it through the checkpoints the military established. Matthew could have left but he did not.

Now she is alone. Now he is dead. Now he is buried beneath a mound of black dirt with a shovel stuck in it. She does not cry. Though sweating feels like a kind of crying, her clothes soaked through, her hair plastered to her forehead in damp whorls. When her hair started to grow out blond again, he touched its roots and said, “Why did you hide that from me?” He called it the color of beaten gold, and she called him an English major. When it was long enough, he helped her scissor away the dyed sections of her hair so that she looked like one person, not two.

It happened yesterday. Here in Monmouth. They came from the coast, where Matthew had the idea to steal a boat and sail it north to British Columbia. The beaches were strewn with the reeking carcasses of crab, halibut, sharks, whales thickly netted with flies, poisoned from the Columbia’s outflow, and she could see the cutters and battleships floating several miles out that would intercept them.

On the road they met another couple—Ella and Sam, who were like them; there were many like them, lycans who didn’t want any trouble, who only wanted to be left alone—and they spent the past week together, sleeping in an abandoned house, a brick ranch, nothing conspicuous. They drank gin and talked books and politics and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. One morning, while Claire slept off a hangover, Matthew and the others were sitting on the front porch, drinking coffee and reading old magazines, when a chopper passed overhead.

Choppers were always passing overhead and they ignored it. But it didn’t ignore them. It spotted the three of them—then lit them up with a chain gun. Target practice. She woke to the rattle of gunfire and then the rotor wash banging closed the front door.

She blames herself for not being beside him. She blames Matthew for being so careless and arrogant. She blames the soldier who manned the chain gun, blames the pilot who hovered the Blackhawk over the house, blames the brass for sending squads into an irrecoverable wasteland, blames the entire U.S. war machine for fencing lycans in, here and abroad, and expecting them to tuck tail. But most of all she blames the Resistance. She blames Balor. Because of him everyone believed that lycans are feral, are capable only of raw animality. Because of him her world has become one big grave.

She pops a few iodine pills and glugs them down with a long pull from her canteen. She knows the iodine can only do so much to defend her, to fight the radiation. She knows that, given enough time to work its way through her system, the radiation will bloom into yellow tumors.

There are other unmarked, freshly dug graves here in this cemetery. And there are unburied bodies, too, maybe the remains of those who dragged themselves here to expire. Again she considers joining them, opening up her head with a bullet. This isn’t a new impulse. She thinks often about suicide. A rope around her neck knotted to a garage beam. A dive from the top of a building. A long swim into the ocean. After a momentary discomfort, there would be no more hunger, no more fear, no more running and running and running.

The shovel she used still has a neon-yellow $19.99 price stickered to it. She was in a fog when she roamed the store, a Bi-Mart at the end of the block, not looking for anything except what she needed: a wheelbarrow to transport his body, a shovel to bury him. She left Ella and Sam where they lay on the porch. She could muster the energy for only one funeral. Now that is done. Now, she supposes, she needs to return to the store. Several times a day she pumps up her back bicycle tire and needs a patch kit for the leak. Ammo, if she can find any. Nuts, granola bars. A new jacket, the one she stole from REI rotted through from the toxic rain.

Finally she stands. For a long time she wavers in place, like a risen corpse, before stumbling down the hill. It feels good to have a job. A purpose. It makes her not think about killing herself. It helps clarify her mind, propel her body. She will leave the graveyard. She will collect her supplies. And then she will, to the best of her ability, find Balor and put a bullet through his eye.

She is near the gated entrance to the cemetery when she hears it—the distant noise of dogs barking accompanied by a high-pitched and unmistakably human scream.

She gave up on her Glock after it jammed twice. She prefers the reliability, the heft and power, of the .357 Smith & Wesson she pried from a corpse at a kitchen table, a suicide outside Portland, his hand curled so tightly around the stock she had to break his fingers. Everywhere she goes, she takes the revolver with her, carried in a belt holster so that she has a yellow callus along her hip. She withdraws it now.

The graves—marked mostly with crosses, rounded and squared headstones, punctuated by the occasional crypt—rise up the hill. At its summit she spots movement. Someone running. A girl. She wears a white T-shirt several sizes too big, so that she at first appears a billowing phantom. She darts between the graves, zigzagging down the hill.

The barking grows louder. Claire spots them, a tide of dogs—white and gray and brown—plunging down the hillside, chasing the girl. The distance between them closes. Thirty yards, twenty yards, ten. The girl is almost at the bottom of the slope when she risks a look over her shoulder. The dogs are nearly upon her, their barking more frenzied, maddened by the near taste and smell of her.

She realizes the futility of running any farther and clambers up the side of a marble crypt. A Doberman launches itself into the air and snaps its jaws at her dangling feet. But she is too quick. The crypt is six feet tall and topped by a crouching angel and the girl climbs onto its winged shoulders.

This whole time Claire has remained statue still, as if her exhaustion or apathy has created an unbridgeable separation between her and the girl. She came here to say good-bye. Not for this. Not more trouble. But the sight of the girl, maybe ten years old, long black hair falling to either side of her head, surrounded by yapping dogs that tense their hindquarters and flatten their ears and howl for her blood, makes her guts boil with anger. She cannot stop herself. She throws herself toward the crypt, pumping her legs, cocking her revolver.

Now that the girl is out of reach, she watches the dogs calmly, as if they are stuffed animals and not something she needs to fear—until one of them, a big standard poodle, stands up on its hind legs as if to push the crypt over. She screams.

This sends the dogs into convulsions, exciting them even more. They jitter and prance and wag their whole bodies and bawl like some kind of mob hungry for an execution. Claire counts twenty of them—Rottweilers, Dobermans, German shepherds, Labradors, even a wiener dog. Their coats are knotted and filthy and speckled with burs.

Claire skids to a stop ten yards away. “Hey,” she says. “Hey, dogs!” At once the whole horde turns to look at her, panting, hesitantly wagging their tails. She wonders if two instincts—loyalty and hunger—fight inside them like a Siamese monster. She doesn’t know what to say, so she says, “Bad dogs.”

At this some of them peel back their lips, showing their teeth, while others whine and stutter-step forward, as if she were an old friend they hardly recognize.

There are more dogs than there are bullets in her revolver, Claire realizes. She wonders if she can summon the strength, the desire, to transform. She doubts it. With the sweat drying on her skin and her back spasming and her nails rimmed with half-moons of dirt and Matthew only an hour in the ground, she feels impossibly empty.

The poodle, a mud-caked mess of hair, moves toward her, looking at once ridiculous and terrifying.

“Sit,” she says. “Sit. Stay. Roll over.” But the poodle keeps coming.

She lifts the revolver. It feels incredibly heavy in her hands. The poodle lowers its head and begins a hunch-shouldered charge. Saliva swings from its teeth when it opens its mouth to bite her. She puts a bullet in its leg and it screams in a terribly human way before collapsing and rising again and limping fast and far from her, leaving behind a trail of blood.

At the sound of the gunshot—a whipping crack that bottoms out and echoes away—the other dogs scatter, diving down rows of graves. They bark and yowl as they thread their way back up the hill, disappearing into the trees that thicken toward its top.

The wiener dog is the only one who lingers, peeking from behind the crypt. Claire holsters her gun and lifts her arms and says, “Yaaaaah!” and the dog releases a tiny stream of pee before trotting off to join its pack.

Claire looks at the girl and the girl looks at her, looks away, and then gets brave enough to maintain a stare. Brown eyes, broad cheekbones, skin the color of upturned earth. Under the giant T-shirt she wears jean shorts, Velcro tennis shoes. Claire raises her hand—the universal sign for
hey
—and the girl does the same. They each manage a small smile. “Speak English?” Claire says.

Her expression does not change and Claire sees in it the same thing she saw in the wiener dog: a mixture of fear and loneliness that at once makes the girl want to rush forward and back away.

“Down,” Claire says. “
Abajo
.” Or is it
derriba
? She can’t remember. High school seems ten thousand years ago. She motions with her hand. “Down.
Down
. Before they get brave and come back.”

The girl doesn’t move, except her eyebrows coming together to form a silent question: is Claire dangerous?

“
No estoy peligroso
,” she says. “No kidding. I’m a good guy.
Yo estoy su amiga
.”

“I’m not stupid,” the girl says with a soft accent. “I can speak English.”

“You a lycan?”

The girl gives her eyes a theatrical roll and says, “I’m Latina,” and Claire thinks,
this
is why I hate kids.

“We need to get going.”

Except to sneeze into her hands, the girl does not move.

It would be so much easier to walk away, to abandon the girl. Why should she care? Why should she even go on breathing? A part of her wants to whistle the dogs back and lay bare her neck for them to maul.