Red Moon (42 page)

O
F COURSE THERE ARE
other ways into the Ghostlands besides the perimeter checkpoints. Looters have cut the wire fencing. Undocumented Mexicans too. Like pioneers following a trail west to begin anew and take whatever there is to take from the place, mine the ground, plant their crops, hammer together structures to protect them from the elements, to shelter them when they bear their children.

Then there are the freedom fighters—like Max and the Americans—who have tunneled under the perimeter so that they can go hunting. Max writes a blog called
AngryAmerican
. On it he posts music videos by Toby Keith, rants about closed borders, the effectiveness of torture, the need for lycan internment camps, the worthlessness of the dollar next to the euro. His bio reads, “I’m pissed.” His contact info is listed and every now and then he will receive an email calling him a villain or a hero. Some want to know how to join the fight. Some want to prove him wrong, to convert him. He loves how violent the liberals can get with their language. “I want to see you hang,” one wrote, “alongside the president. And as your faces turn blue and your eyeballs burst and dribble down your faces, I will laugh.”

Then comes the message from a man who wishes to remain anonymous and who works for the government and who wants to help Max in any way that he can. “I know,” he writes, “that you abhor the government for its interference and legion inefficiencies. As do I. I am not a politician, nor am I a bureaucrat. I am more like a missile or a handgun. I come to you as a weapon. And as a friend.”

Now, a few weeks and a few dozen emails later, here they are, in an abandoned Methodist church in the small town of Dorris, along the Oregon-California border. This is where they have been headquartered for the past two months. There was a time when Max believed that writing a letter and handing out flyers and speaking at farmers’ markets and marching on Washington made a difference, but that time is over. He believes in action. He believes in doing.

He has a dozen men who believe the same. They sit in the pews around him. Their heads are shaved. Their shirts are white, their pants khaki, their boots polished black. They do not cuss. They do not drink or smoke or befoul their bodies. They spend several hours a week throwing weights around and riding stationary bikes to thicken their bodies with muscle and ready them for the long-distance running and hand-to-hand combat sometimes necessary in the Ghostlands. The backs of their hands are inked with silver
bullets
.

A homemade banner hanging from the wall reads
FELLOWSHIP
. The stained-glass windows glow faintly with moonlight, all their fragmented colors reduced to blue. A kerosene lantern shines on the communion table. The candelabras—lit and set about the room—sputter.

In the basement, through the cinder-block wall, they have built a tunnel fifty feet long and six-by-six-feet square, the sidewalls framed by two-by-four studs. It runs underneath the perimeter fence. It is big enough for them to roll their dirt bikes through to the other side.

In the basement there is also a Ping-Pong table and they have laid upon it their instruments of change: shotguns, machetes, chainsaws, gasoline and matches, baseball bats with spikes nailed into them. Next to it, on the wall, where a quilt once hung, they have hammered scalps. Fifty at last count. Of every color imaginable, but all reddened along the edges. Their own kind of craft.

The Tall Man stands before them now, in a black suit, with his arms held out, like some ghastly preacher. He has brought them supplies. Grenades, Glocks, M4s and M16s, a Heckler & Kock PSG1 sniper rifle, and so many crates of ammo, which an hour ago they hauled rattling down the stairs. There is more where this came from. And there are of course conditions to their little arrangement, as he calls it. They will not advertise their presence in the Ghostlands and they will not speak out about any governmental assistance. Their discretion is of course very much valued. And should he call upon them, and he may or may not call upon them, but if he should, they will do as he says. He may have a target, some concentric circles drawn on a paper map he might send them toward to slash through, or he may not. Only time will tell.

His voice is a slow baritone, every word clearly enunciated and separate from the next, notes sprung from a bassoon. “For now, you need not worry about whether what you’re doing is legal. You need only worry about whether it is right. And it is right. I would not be here otherwise.”

Max sits in the front pew, his elbows on his knees, his hands knotted in front of his face, a position of prayer. “Every now and then we get a call. Otherwise, we keep doing what we’re doing. And you’re backing us.”

“You are doing good work. I want to help you to continue to do good work.”

“No government interference?”

“In this uncivil twilight, we make our own choices, we wear our true faces.” And what a face he has, like chewed gum mashed onto a hot sidewalk, a face Max finds equally disturbing and reassuring—reassuring because what you see is what you get. He wears, like he says, his true face. The world would be easier if everyone wore their true face. That’s why he likes John Wayne movies. The villain wears a black hat; the good guy wears a white hat. You know where you stand. But anybody can be a lycan. Your neighbor, your cousin, your waiter, that girl giving you the eye at the post office. They fool you. They wear masks that hide how hairy they are on the inside. Now, at least, they are caged. The perimeter fence cages them. In that way, the Ghostlands might be the best thing that ever happened to this country. The soldiers are turning people away, but Max says let them in, let them all in, and then shoot them where they stand and burn them and scatter the bones.

He wants the Tall Man—who appears to be grinning, though it is hard to tell, his mouth hanging open and swallowing a shadow—to leave. Leave them, leave the weapons. But the Tall Man does not. For a long minute he studies Max with his lidless gaze.

“We good, then?” Max says.

At that the Tall Man tucks his hands in his pockets and gives them all one last assessing look before saying, “Go raise some hell.”

N
EAL DESAI NOTES
the time on his wristwatch, 3:20. Seven hours since the generator coughed out. The green glowing face of his watch fades to black. He wonders how long it will be until its battery runs out, until time goes still for him as it has for so many others. He wonders how many clocks stopped at the minute of the blast and how many melted until the numbers were indecipherable. He hopes that his wife and daughter died like this—quickly, in a time-stopping flash—rather than winding down slowly, like him.

He is so hungry. He is not sure when he last ate. Two days ago, three? When he let the last of the rations dissolve on his tongue. His body feels as though it is eating itself. His wristwatch and his belt are notched as far as they can go, his belly concave beneath the canopy of his ribs.

He is not alone. He can feel the thing sitting on the counter, feel it as if it were alive. The vial. He hates it. It is the reason he spent so many thousands of hours in the lab. It is the reason he did not put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger when the ground shook and the sky lit up and the alarms sounded, when he realized what had happened. It is the reason he has been holed up beneath the ground, waiting, waiting—for what, he no longer knows—his thoughts no longer coming together, frayed at the edges by hunger and isolation.

His whole life people have been telling him how smart he is, but he feels dumb now, too dumb to do it, to end it. For so long Sridavi has been his reason for living—the hours in the lab devoted to her, not to humanity, not to the alleged well-being of the nation, not to any political cause, or so he tells himself, now that she is gone. Now that he lives for the vial, the vaccine.

He was watching television when it happened. Jet-lagged from his time in the Republic. Weary of talking to reporters about the assassination attempt on Chase Williams. He only wanted to tune out. But every station played news of the election and no matter how many times he flipped the channel, he saw the same stupid smirk, heard the same celebratory speech. The idiot had been elected.

This was good for Neal, good for his research—he knew that—but he could not help but feel like an accomplice in some fool’s magic act, part of the illusion everyone wanted to believe in. The American people had sent a message—that’s what the talking heads said. The American people wanted change. The American people wanted to feel safe. Chase Williams meant security and—

From outside came a flash of light, as if a passing truck had clicked on its brights. Then the picture on the television lurched and froze and collapsed into darkness. Three lightbulbs sizzled, then exploded. A teacup shuddered off the counter and shattered against the tile.

He hurried out into the yard in time to see the moon lit red, like some new sun swung into orbit. The sky to the north churned with what could be clouds or could be smoke. His first instinct is to call out for his wife and daughter, but they are gone. Gone to Washington. The direction of the blast. Where Sridavi was supposed to be safe, to heal. He was alone.

By the time he discovered what had happened, by the time he shoved his revolver into the waist of his pants, by the time he packed some food in a duffel and ripped the cords from his computer and hurled them both into the car, it was too late.

The streets were jammed with cars. The night chaotic with honking, screaming. He heard gunfire. He saw pillars of smoke rising from fires lit by arson or short circuit. He didn’t have far to go—the lab only five miles away—but the streets were impassable and he had not filled up on gas, as he meant to the other day, so he worried his quarter of a tank might not be enough to get him through the gridlock. Brake lights colored the night red. He was laying on his horn—trying to blast the traffic unstuck, though he knew it was pointless—when he saw the first lycan.

Neal did not recognize him immediately for what he was. The man seemed drunk or mad or injured because of the swaybacked, loose-limbed way he moved. The streetlamps were dead, so it wasn’t until he stepped into the road, into the sweep of headlights, that Neal noticed the hair, the blunt snout, the blood-bathed teeth. He ripped open the door of a canary-yellow VW bug and climbed in to join the passengers, who flailed their arms and struggled too late with their seat belts.

Neal hit the door locks and glanced suddenly around him. He was in a commercial area and the sidewalks and parking lots were busy with people clustered in groups and hurrying along, all their faces dark and impossible to decipher. There was an alley up ahead that cut between a sandwich shop and a bookstore and he cranked the wheel and pounded the car up on the sidewalk. People dodged out of his way, some of them cursing him, throwing up their arms, knocking a fist into his windshield—and then he was in the alley, rushing past the Dumpsters and splashing through puddles left by yesterday’s rainstorm. His side mirror struck a pipe and ripped off.

When he cut through the other side, to a side street full of saltbox houses with chain-link fences, he spotlighted a long-haired lycan—whether man or woman, he couldn’t tell—hunched over a girl and feeding on the bowl of her belly. He took his foot off the brake and mashed it onto the gas and gritted his teeth against the heavy thud, the rise and fall of the left front wheel when he rocked over and crushed both their bodies.

He saw, in the labyrinthine route he followed to the lab, many more lycans tearing off their clothes and scrabbling about on all fours and tackling passersby. He cranked the radio dial and the few stations that came through told him what he already knew: this was an uprising. Later, the world would learn that many lycans were as afraid as Neal, as eager to escape, but right now there was the overwhelming sense that the world had gone feral.

The radio told him that the blast originated in the Tri-Cities area, that by all accounts the reactors were in a state of meltdown. He accepted then that his wife and daughter were dead—lost to a blast as severe as the sun’s breath—but did not have time to mourn them, all of his energy focused on the five feet of road unspooling ahead of him.

The Center for Lobos Studies was a galaxy of light. The emergency generators had kicked on when the blackout hit. The parking lot, as expected, was empty. Even the security guards had abandoned their posts, the booth at the gates vacant and brightly lit, a paperback novel laid open to the page its owner thought he would one day return to. Neal drove into the entry lane, his grille nudging the crossbar, before killing the engine. In the sudden silence he noticed he was breathing as if back from a hard run.

Over the past few months, there had been protests staged in the parking lot. Virtually every day, security ended up hauling someone away, someone waving a gun, a knife. More than once, Neal was evacuated due to a bomb scare. Some of them were animal rights protesters and some of them lycan sympathizers and some of them lycans. If this was an uprising, then the center would be in their crosshairs. Neal didn’t think he had much time.

He had been working out of the old lab for the past few months, while construction continued on the five-million-dollar Pfizer-funded extension. It was a massive round-roofed building that looked like a whaleback rolling out of the earth. Last he heard, they were to begin moving their equipment next week, the exterior finished, the interior electrical, tile work, and painting still under way. One of its features: a safe room in the basement with coded locks, refrigeration units, a separate well, filtered air, and generators with enough fuel to last six months.

He hurried the two hundred yards, first with his duffel and computer, a stitch in his side so severe he felt as if a knife had run through his ribs. He keyed open the building and tromped down the stairs and rounded the corner to where the door was waiting for him, as unassuming as a closet except for the steel-tooth keypad. He punched in the code, his birthday, and it swung open with the cold breath of a crypt.

He dumped everything he carried and then ran back upstairs and exited the building and staggered more than ran to his lab, where he unlocked a storage cabinet and grabbed as many vaccine vials as he could fit in his pockets. He nearly took them from the fridge and then decided he couldn’t trust the power, so chose the vials full of lyophilized powder that were sterile and must be reconstituted with diluent before injection. They were stable enough to survive harsh conditions.

He hurried his way outside again. When he plodded along the pathways that snaked between the buildings, the vials clinked and jingled. He realized he was sweating heavily, despite the night’s chill. He could not seem to get enough air—and his chest ached in time with his pulse. He leaned against a building as long as he dared.

He wanted to lie down in the grass and rest. It looked so soft and he was so tired. But he couldn’t. The cranberry glow of the sky reminded him of that.

On trembling legs, he started forward, not jogging, walking, knowing he would collapse if he wasn’t careful. A cold wind blew and the bare-branched trees shook like things half-alive. He was twenty yards away from the Pfizer Lab when he heard the roar of engines, saw headlights smear across the glass-doored entry. He tried to turn and as he did so his knee popped, buckled. He fell into a heap.

He felt a sharpness and heard a sharp chiming at his side. He had crushed some of the vials. He lay there a moment, willing himself to move, gulping air down a throat that felt blistered, as if he had been sucking on a hair dryer. There was something wrong with his knee. It felt loose, unbound. And when he tried to move it, he felt a sting, as if a wasp had burrowed into the joint. He struggled into a seated position and then managed to stand upright. His knee nearly gave way, but he had no choice except to put the pain far from his mind. He dragged himself forward—a few feet at a time—lurching and resting, lurching and resting.

He heard glass exploding. He heard wood splintering, metal banging, plastic shattering—and he could picture clearly the desks overturned and file cabinets knocked over and computers hurled against walls, their wiry guts spilling everywhere. Then he heard footsteps padding along the concrete pathway.

He groped for the revolver at his waist. It was slick with sweat and lost in the fat of his belly. By the time he retrieved it, the lycan was almost upon him. A woman. Her hair dreadlocked. A hemp necklace the only thing she wore. He did not get a closer look than this because she did not pause in her approach, a blur of hair and muscle. He fired. The bullet shouted. She squealed and fell and curled up on herself.

Once the gunshot faded, howling replaced it. They would close in on him soon.

Somehow he managed to shoulder his way into the building—to thud down the stairs—to drag the steel door closed behind him—before they found him. But find him they did. He put his hands over his ears when they threw their bodies against the door, again and again, a thundering that seemed like it would never stop. Until it did.

That was five months ago. Sometimes he doesn’t know whether he is waking or dreaming. Sometimes he talks to himself. Sometimes he shits and pisses freely on the floor. Once he woke and thought a lycan crouched over him, its face only inches away, its mouth open to reveal the serrated edge of its teeth. Neal issued an animal cry and scampered to the far corner of the room and huddled there in a ball. “Stay away from me,” he said. “You stay away from me!” But of course he was alone.

Still, he can’t help but keep his revolver close, tucked into the back of his pants, so that the skin there is thick with callus. The generators are still humming, but the lightbulbs burned out a week ago and now he spends his days alone in the dark, the pace of his breathing the only conversation.

Only one of the vials survived; the rest shattered in his escape. It sits on the counter, along with his laptop, his papers. Waiting.

There is a sink in the corner. This is Neal’s toilet, washbasin, and drinking source. He tries to fill up his belly on the water from the tap. His hands shake when he fumbles for his glass, a beaker. He fills it and brings it blindly to his mouth and starts with a thin swallow. But that is not enough. He swings it back. The water sloshes and bubbles. His neck convulses when he swallows. He drinks and drinks until he chokes and coughs and vomits and then drinks some more.

Many years ago, he went on a no-carb diet and lost fifty pounds in a month. His skin sagged off him as if he were melting. “I don’t recognize you,” people said. That was because he was no longer himself. He was meant to be heavy. And now he is moving further and further away from what he is meant to be, the fat gone from his body, his bones pressing through his loose skin. He is now at the point where he has nothing left to lose.

He remembers, what feels at once like ten minutes ago and ten years ago, watching a show on the Discovery Channel. It was about identity. At one point in the episode, a scientist posed a question about what made you feel like you. Suppose, say, he was to steadily replace every cell in your body with a cell from Ronald Reagan. When would you cease to be yourself? Could a single cell, somewhere in the middle of the transfer, make all the difference? What if you retained your body but your brain was transplanted? What if you descended into a coma or succumbed to dementia—when do you cease to be? What is the line that distinguishes you from not-you? With his daughter, he could point to the precise moment when everything changed, when she was and was no longer his little girl. As for himself? There is a stainless-steel paper-towel dispenser above the sink. Before the lightbulbs burned out, he would study his ghostly reflection in it. Toward the end, he did not recognize himself—bony and sallow skinned as he is—but he wonders if the stranger he sees might have come to life some time ago, long before the day the world exploded.

He opened the door once. The hallway was pitch-black and he coughed at the smell of smoke and when he thought he heard something shuffle and scrape toward him, he slammed the entry shut and pressed his back against it.