Red Moon (41 page)

“Where are your parents anyway?” Claire immediately regrets asking and in her chest gets this jab of dread when the girl scrunches up her face and starts breathing heavily like kids do before they really lose it.

“Forget it.” Claire holds up her hands and twiddles her fingers and says, “Come on. Come on already.”

After a hesitant moment, the girl scoots her butt toward the edge, dangles her legs, and falls into Claire’s arms.

T
HIS IS WHAT HAPPENED
in the seconds after the plane exploded in the belly of the Hanford nuclear facility. The electrical circuit board surged and spit fire. The turbines ceased spinning; the coolant water stopped flowing. The heat spiked. The power surged and caused a steam explosion that caused the containment vessel’s caps to evaporate. The control rods and graphite insulating blocks melted. And the radioactive core ignited, creating a blast as powerful as two nuclear bombs that mushroomed upward and pinwheeled cars through the air and burned to ash anything living within a hundred miles and made the moon glow an angry red.

The president declared the Pacific Northwest, and then the West Coast, and then the Plains, a state of emergency. He ordered the citizens of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana to evacuate. He did not acknowledge that the polls had just closed, that the media had called the race hours ago. That he had lost. For the moment, that was an irrelevance, as freeways clogged with people driving as fast and as far away as they could.

Clouds boiled over the open reactor. Helixes of flame played across the sky. Lightning uncurled and lashed the ground like white whips. A hot wind blew east and spiked the atmospheric radiation as far away as Michigan.

The same night as the explosion, a video was released on the Internet. In it, Balor and the Resistance claimed responsibility for the attack and declared the Pacific Northwest their own sovereign territory. Lycanica, he called it. He asked others to join them there. And he asked all lycans already in the region to savage their neighbor and in doing so make them a fellow citizen—and to remain in Oregon, despite the radiation, for the greater good.

Five months later, an estimated five million are dead.

Everything has gone splendidly. Everything has gone exactly according to plan. Because of him. Because of him, a new nation has been carved out—with November 6 its Independence Day. It does not bother him that he is surrounded. Fencing, studded with military bases, corrals the borders of Washington and Oregon. Battleships patrol the coastline. Drones knife across the sky with a cut-paper whisper. Bombs sound like distant thunder. They reduce water towers, power stations, to smoldering craters. This is to be expected. So is the economic crisis—the S&P double downgrade, the stock market diving more than four thousand points—that will soon enough result in the retraction of the military. The Ghostlands, they must realize, are a lost cause. The Ghostlands, they will accept, are his.

He debated a long time where to headquarter. The capitol building would be too obvious, a mall or skyscraper too difficult to defend. They considered the Rajneesh compound in Central Oregon but decided it was too far from any resources. They considered a correctional institute in Salem, a squat, mustard-colored building, but he did not want any of his men to read into this a metaphor for what their life had become. He needed them happy. And he needed a city to loot. And he needed a defensible position. And that is why they chose the Pittock Mansion.

It is a twenty-three-room chateau—built in 1914 by Henry
Pittock
, the publisher of the
Oregonian
—in the West Hills of Portland. Forty-six acres surrounded by wrought-iron fencing that contains the sheep and goats and cattle that now wander the grounds. The walls are made from sandstone and will withstand gunfire. The fireplaces will keep them warm in the winter, the high ceilings cool in the summers. The outbuildings serve as storage for the gasoline they have harvested, for the iodine pills they crush into their meals and water to fight the radiation that brings sores to their skin.

He rolls down the hill now as part of a convoy—three black Expeditions tricked out with brush guards and bulletproof windows followed by a semi hauling a trailer. Despite the heat, he wears a tailored charcoal suit from Brooks Brothers. No tie. His long silvery hair carefully parted down the middle and tucked behind his ears. Next to him sits the giant, Morris Magog, crushed behind the steering wheel. The backseats have been folded down and upon them rest flats full of beans, rice, salsa, candy, granola bars, bags of chips, piles of fresh muskmelons to be distributed to all those who attend this afternoon’s gathering at Pioneer Courthouse.

He knows what they say about his eye. That he was wounded by shrapnel, that he was bitten by a snake, that he was poisoned by the military, that he was shot and the bullet passed through his cornea and nested in his brain. The truth is, when he was a boy, his vision began to fog over. Headaches plagued him daily. His mother took him to a doctor in his village, who examined him and told them it was a tumor and he did not have the ability to operate on it. His mother took him to a military hospital and begged their services. They turned her away, and when she would not leave, they struck her face with the butt end of a rifle and then kicked her when she fell. “But he will die,” she told them and they told her, “We know.” That was when his mother began to pray. She prayed when dawn broke and when night fell. She prayed before meals. She clasped her hands together and sometimes held him against her breast when whispering words he could not decipher, some desperate incantation to fight the nosebleeds and then the darkness that eclipsed his eye. One night he woke to find a white figure standing over his bed. There was only a smear where a face should have been. There were only tendrils where fingers should have been. It reached for him—it reached into him, into his face—and there he felt a needle jab of exquisite pain. When the hand retreated, it gripped something black and squirming. He believed this an extraordinary nightmare until the next morning when he woke and could see. Not perfectly, but he could see, his left eye like a dirty window. The doctor told him the tumor was gone. “I do not understand,” he said. “I must have been wrong.”

“By the will of God,” his mother said. By the will of God he lived. He was the will of God. He does not share this with others. He keeps it hidden, like the statue of a saint buried upside down in a backyard. It does not matter that his men believe in God—it only matters that they believe in him.

The Expedition follows the road down the hill and out the gates and through neighborhoods of tightly clustered bungalows, their yards waist-high with weeds and grass gone to seed. He spots snakes sunning themselves on the blacktop, bees swarming out of an open mailbox, a red-tailed hawk picking apart the purplish remains of a cat. He has helped make this happen: the world returning to its natural state.

When a deer bounds out between two houses and skitters to a stop in a driveway, he lays a hand on Magog’s wrist and tells him to stop. “Slowly.” He unholsters the 9-millimeter at his belt. The window hums when he opens it. He rests his elbows on the sill and closes his dead eye. The deer, a buck with the mere beginning of two velvety horns, stares back at him, twitches an ear, then startles backward when he fires. It makes it ten feet before collapsing. Its legs continue to kick as if dreaming their way to escape. He watches the animal until it goes still. “Throw it in the back,” he says. “We’ll spit it over the fire.” The giant swings open his door and climbs out and the vehicle shakes with his abandoned weight.

Balor holsters his pistol and closes the window and cranks the AC. He feels a pleasant heat spreading through him, a rush of endorphins that makes his mind buzz and his skin prickle. The equivalent, he supposes, of sex. He does not hunger for it the way the others do. He has never visited the woman they keep in the basement, though he is glad she is there to satisfy the others. He gratifies his appetite in other ways. The letting of blood, for him, like the letting of semen. An impulse that satisfies his hunger and his need to dominate and infect, to multiply.

Several hundred of his children will be in attendance today. He knows there are thousands of others spread across the Pacific Northwest and more trying to sneak their way past the border every day. He knows they are afraid. He knows some of them are sick. He knows that they are uncomfortable and inconvenienced by the lack of electricity and running water. He will tell them that their discomfort is only temporary. He will tell them his plans. He will shake every one of their hands and he will look into every one of their eyes and he will tell them not to worry for this is only the beginning.

T
HIS SIDE OF THE MOUNTAINS
, in the high desert of Eastern Oregon, dogs roam freely, broken glass sparkles in the streets, front doors swing open and shut with the wind, freezers leak lines of blood, bodies lay about in various states of decay, as rounded and wooden as their own coffins. As a cleaner, in a radiation suit straight out of Buck Rogers, Patrick and his squad clear roads of abandoned vehicles, drag corpses into piles and light them up with flamethrowers. The reasoning is unclear, the area uninhabitable. But orders are orders.

As is the case with Chernobyl, a concrete sarcophagus now encases the Hanford site, but the damage has been done. Radiation will cling to the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Whether a hundred or a thousand or a million years, the president says, it doesn’t matter: the United States will reclaim Oregon and Washington one town at a time.

Nobody wants to go out on the wire. Everyone wants sentry duty at the Ontario checkpoint. Keeping the curious and the crazies and the lycan sympathizers out, treating with chemical showers all those who travel within. Hurricane fencing stretches off into the distance. The interstate leading up to the checkpoint is stacked with concrete blockades so that cars must crank their wheel one way, then another, then another, slowing to a crawl before reaching the first security post, twenty yards out. Exiting the Ghostlands takes four stages. First, every vehicle is searched, and then everyone, after which time they are photographed, fingerprinted, questioned—then sent to a dosimeter crew for radiation and blood tests—followed by several hours of detainment in a chain-link pen while their case is considered.

There was a time when the line of cars stretched off into the desert haze, but these days, most everyone who wants to flee has fled, except for the occasional lycan disenchanted after living too long without restaurants, Internet, electricity. Sometimes two or three days go by when no civilians pass through the checkpoint at all.

Everyone likes it this way, likes how peaceful and predictable sentry duty has become, with plenty of time for bullshit and magazines, darts, card games, almost like a vacation, the world so empty here, with the sagebrush flats stretching off into the distance. It is a stark, beautiful landscape, untroubling because it is composed mostly of nothing.

This has made the soldiers on sentry duty lazy, so Patrick is certain he can get away with his plan. And Malerie is going to help him, though she doesn’t know it yet.

From his father’s email account, he patched together hundreds of pages of correspondence with Neal Desai. He already knew they had gone to college together at UC Davis, both biochem majors, but that was the extent of it. He learned that his father had enlisted around the same time Neal began applying to graduate programs, that his father had taken the job at the brewery around the same time Neal accepted a postdoc fellowship. His father had been experimenting on dogs in his garage while Neal was training a lab of technicians how to inject prions into the brain of a rat. Their children—Patrick and a girl named Sridavi—were around the same age. And both men had a personal stake in their research: they loved the infected.

In one of their emails—which dated back almost two years—his father wrote, “I was thinking about that time we tried to buy beer. You remember that? We glued on beards we bought from the Halloween store. The guy at the liquor store took one look at us and said get lost. We were so depressed. We were so sure we were going to be able to pull it off. I can’t stop thinking about those beards. Those stupid glue-on beards. What if the body doesn’t have the same careful eye as that guy at the liquor store? We know it doesn’t.”

To stimulate an immune response, to get the body to recognize lobos as an infection, his plan was to develop a vaccine that attaches prion proteins to a live modifier, an altered and attenuated strain of salmonella.

Neal took it away from there, and Patrick saw that the “Breakthrough!” message his father sent him corresponded directly with the first successful inoculation of an infected dog.

The vaccine is ready. It has not gone through human trials, but it is ready. Waiting for him in the Ghostlands.

Malerie has that special shade of hair, sometimes red and sometimes brown, depending on the light. Back in high school she was good to look at, but out here, with nothing but men and wild dogs to keep everyone company, she is beautiful. She has apologized to him endlessly over the past few days. “I’ve done a lot of growing up since then,” she says. So has he. Those were different times, and he can’t help but feel inclined to forgive her and enjoy the hard bud of her body, her Eastern Oregon drawl like a mouthful of honey, their conversations about everything—about love. “I thought I loved Max,” she says, “but I was wrong. I don’t think I’ve ever really been
in
love. Like, movie love. Like, can’t-think-straight head-over-heels love.” She has not seen Max since graduation, and good riddance. After the courthouse square bombing, she says, he became even more dangerous, obsessive.

“How about you? You ever been in love?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

In the barracks, in her private quarters, a square concrete cell with a sink and a bed and a bookshelf, she lies on top of Patrick, naked. He is bigger now, strapped with muscle, and he jokes that he might put her in his mouth like a piece of candy. She fingers the gummed-up scar along his shoulder. She lays an ear to his chest so she can listen to his heart. “Everybody always says they want life to be like in the movies,” she says and rakes her fingers through his chest hair. “Now it is. Now life is like a movie. But it’s the
wrong
movie.”

He says, “You said it,” but he isn’t really listening. He is too busy with his own thoughts, all mangled in his mind. He runs a finger up her spine, into her hair, then back down to her lumbar vertebrae, where her shoulders narrow into her neck. He circles the spot and she hums and says, “I like that.”

He wants to say, “You shouldn’t,” but doesn’t. This circle he traces is a sort of bull’s-eye. Here you put your knife if you want to paralyze someone. As much as it horrifies him, every part of her body he considers both a soft, curved, perfumed thing—and a target. Which gives him a sick feeling at the bottom of his heart he recognizes as both the beginnings of affection and the opposite of it.

“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got this filter, and all the stuff that’s supposed to go in and out, between the world and me, it gets muffled.”

He has never told anyone this before, but it is true. He doesn’t know whether it is the death of his father, his time in the Republic, the impossible devastation of the Hanford explosion, or some combination of them all, but emotionally, he hasn’t felt anything in a long time. A song on the radio that might have nodded his head, tapped his foot—or a scene in a movie that might have jacked up his heart rate—nothing. Food is filling and sex is emptying.

Malerie traces a fingernail around his nipple until it hardens into a point. “I need you to do something for me,” he says.

She pinches the nipple and he swats her hand away and she says, “Anything.”

Normally, in a combat zone, he only gets nights and weekends off, but to keep morale up, the brass is handing out liberty time. “I’ve got a few days libo coming up. I want you to sneak me into the Ghostlands.”

She sits up in bed; her breasts swing. “What on earth for?”

“That’s my business.”

“Fuck you, it’s your business.”

“Hey, you owe me, right?”

“I don’t owe you that much.”

“You owe me. You said it yourself. You owe me.”

“You’re going to end up dead or we’re both going to end up in the brig.”

“You owe me.”