Red Moon (43 page)

What chance did he have out there? How could Neal keep himself alive, keep the vial safe? His knee was ruined—he could barely drag himself across the room. His only choice is to wait. Someone will come. Someone has to come.

If someone doesn’t, he will die. He is dying. His body is eating itself. And if he dies, everything will have been a waste. His years in the lab. His daughter’s suffering. All this time entombed beneath the ground, this room like a black hole awaiting its dead. He cannot let that be true. He must live. For him to live, he must eat.

Sometimes he thinks he hears things outside the door. Whispers. Claws gently teased across the steel. But now, when he presses his ear against it, he can only hear his own stomach—gurgling, whining. Hunger is his only voice. He doubles over until the cramping passes and then he reaches for the doorknob and clamps his hand around it and says to the darkness, to the vial, “I’ll be right back. You’ll see. I’ll go and I’ll get us something to eat.”

C
HASE WILLIAMS
tells the women to take off their clothes. There are two of them, an Asian and a blonde, both as slender waisted as wasps, and they do as they are told. The Asian wears a long red sweater with a black leather belt and knee-high boots to match. When she bends down to unzip the boots, she turns around so that her ass peeks out, the purple thong dividing it. The blonde wears a black thigh-length dress that falls around her ankles in an inky pile. She kicks it aside, along with her heels.

He tells them to touch each other. He tells them to give him a show. No music plays, but they move as though they hear something, tossing their hair and jutting their hips, as their hands roam along a thigh, a breast, the long scoop of a stomach. They snap the bands of their panties. They gaze hungrily at him through the veil of their mascara-clotted lashes.

On the walls of his suite hang two portraits—Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt—squared by gold-leaf frames. The décor changes with every president. He requested these two men specifically—the two men he often referenced on the campaign trail, not Lincoln, not Reagan, not all the old standbys. They seem to stare dispassionately at the women along with him. They were, Chase has always said, the right kind of assholes. Everyone calls this place the People’s House, instead of the White House, and he likes that, likes the way the term looks past the sculptures and polished woodwork and museum-quality hush and acknowledges instead ordinariness, the possibility of weakness, dirty little secrets.

Though he does not tell the women to do so, they slowly gravitate toward the bed, knowing that this is where he will want them. They cannot simply fall back on it—they have to climb up. The bed is massive—a king-size that rises three feet off the ground—with wooden corner posts that twist upward into snakes. When the stylist asked if he would prefer a queen instead, he gave her a deadening glare and said,
no
, only a king would do.

He does not join them there. He sits in a wingback chair in the corner with his legs crossed. He wears one of the many navy blue suits that appear in his closet as if by magic, all perfectly tailored. A round wooden table beside him carries a brass lamp and a stack of paper-clipped documents from the briefing he attended that morning. He will never read them. The more he reads, the more he feels he doesn’t know.

The women begin to keen and writhe. They unlatch their bras and their breasts tumble out. Their mouths open and their tongues dart out to taste each other. They keep staring at him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. He snaps off the lamp beside him so that he falls into shadow. He wants to look—he doesn’t want them to look at him.

He heard somewhere that presidents age faster, that they go gray and wrinkle suddenly in office. That certainly seems the case. His hair is thinning away from his forehead. His skin is the spotted brown color of a dead leaf. His muscles are soft, his belly bloated. When he gets out of the shower, he doesn’t towel the steam from the mirror. His reflection disgusts him. He no longer has the energy to exercise—he only wants to eat, to sleep. It is strange to think how young he was once, a baby at his mother’s breast, a teenager with a football spiraling from his fingertips, a twenty-something with a throbbing hard-on, and that this person remains curled up inside him somewhere like a worm.

There was a time when the sight of two women rolling around in bed would have sent him into a state close to seizure. That time has passed. He feels curious, of course, but not awakened. He tries to will all the blood in his body to his groin, to pump himself into a state of arousal. Maybe today will be different. Maybe today will be a good day. Because he has two women who will do whatever he asks them. And because so far nothing bad has happened. The absence of a negative. That is a good day. How pathetic he has become. He tries his hand now, tries undoing his belt, massaging what feels like a dead slug. Nothing.

The portraits on the wall now seem to stare at him, their expressions souring, forbidding. He has let them down. One of the women—the blonde—says, “When are you going to come over here and fuck us?” She lies on her back with her legs spread and her hands cupped between them.

“It’s been a long day,” he says.

“What?” she says.

“You can go. You can both go. I’m tired.”

The women sit up, their lipstick smeared, their hair tousled, and then the Asian slides off the bed and slinks toward him. “We want to stay. We want to make you feel good.” She reaches out a hand.

He would retreat from her, but there is nowhere to go. “Get out,” he says and zips himself up and swipes at the air and covers his face with a trembling hand. “Leave me!”

Once he heard a story from a man who worked in a bullet factory. He guessed that over the past ten years he had plated millions of hollow-points. Brass strips punched into primers. One hundred and eighty-five grains. Nickel-plated, copper-plated. All day long he stood at the press and every evening he watched the news and saw how some cop in Arkansas got shot in a routine traffic stop, some sister in New Jersey got a round through the eye when her brother was fooling around with a handgun swiped from a nightstand. He pulls a lever in a factory in Billings and two months and three thousand miles away somebody loses their life. One thing leads to another.

There are so many examples of this. You take a left instead of a right turn and miss a head-on collision that would have left you brain damaged for life. You tease a friend about his shaky hand and it shames him into going to a doctor who discovers a brain tumor just before it metastasizes. You decide to drop by the grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine and reach for a bottle of Shiraz at the same time as a woman with a switchblade smile who will bear you two children before running off with a bartender named Sasa. Think too hard about it and you never want to leave your house. The way one decision can domino through the rest of your life.

A plane packed with C-4 comes spiraling out of the sky. And then?

The Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power generated at the Hanford nuclear site and thirty-one federal dams, goes offline. Its service territory covers all of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and western Montana, as well as small contiguous portions of California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, and eastern Montana. BPA’s wholesale customers include public utilities, public utility districts, municipal districts, public cooperatives, some investor-owned utilities, and a few large industries such as aluminum companies. In addition to the transmission network within the Northwest, BPA operates large interregional transmission lines that connect to Canada, California, and the Southwest. Widespread brownouts and blackouts follow the
explosion
—
followed
by the collapse of the western grid. And then? What happens when the power goes out? When radiation spikes and the Pacific Northwest empties in a matter of days?

The loss of Boeing and Precision Castparts brings the airline industry to a halt.

The loss of Intel’s largest fabrication center, where most of the world’s computer chips are produced and designed, results in a major disruption in the computer and chip market.

Costco collapses. And other companies nearly follow suit, with their heads cut off—Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Microsoft, Starbucks, Cray Computers, Amazon, Safeco and PEMCO, Nordstrom, REI, Alaska Airlines, MSNBC, Nintendo, T-Mobile, Eddie Bauer, Expedia, Greenbrier, and Daimler Trucks.

Seattle’s port, and Portland’s to a smaller degree, brings in many of the products shipped to the U.S. from Asia, a capacity that cannot be covered by other harbors.

Even Facebook is affected, with one of its major data centers in Prineville shut down in an instant.

All of which causes panic and panic causes the collapse of the stock market and the collapse of the stock market triggers a worldwide depression, so that when January 20 comes and Chase is sworn into office in the middle of a blizzard, he knows he has been sentenced to carry the blame. He has virtually no public or congressional support. Partisan disagreements have twice created threats of partial government shutdowns and nearly caused a historic governmental default on their debt.

It is too much to bear.

After the women gather their clothes, after they whisper harshly at each other to hurry, after the door clicks closed, he leaps from his chair. He knocks the lamp from the table, sweeps the briefings to the floor. Before the snowstorm of paper can settle, he marches over to the portraits of Roosevelt and Jackson, ripping them from their hooks, hurling them across the room, one of them striking an antique globe that gashes the canvas. He chucks a pillow, drags the duvet off the bed, and feels sickened by the smell of perfume that lingers here like some contamination. He tears the curtains from their rods and moonlight spills through the windows and makes the suite the color of underwater. He punches the wall and curses at the pain and tucks his hand into his armpit and staggers into the bathroom and snatches a bottle of Volpexx from the cabinet and twists off its top as if breaking the neck of a bird.

The bathroom is windowless, a marble cell. He observes his shadowy image in the mirror. He appears a phantom. He has been close to death before, but it always felt like something that could be avoided, something that gave off an almost repellant force. Now the opposite seems true, as if it were an inevitability, a dark mouth drawing him in.

One thing leads to another. Cause and effect. If one person’s choice to pack a plane with C-4 could open up a crater that the entire nation has collapsed into, then maybe he could make a choice too, one that might be similarly impactful. The choice to heal. He imagines something beginning here, in this moment, that would spread outward and affect everyone.

He breathes heavily when he stands over the toilet and shakes the bottle empty and flushes, knowing that if he waits another moment he might end up dipping his head into the bowl and palming to his mouth the pills already dissolving there.

He hears a knock. There is always a knock. That is the problem with this place. He can never be alone. Even here, on the second story, his residence, someone is always posted in the hall, always watching, always asking if he needs something, as if he were infirm or a child with a lost expression. He prefers Camp David.

A knock is never a good thing. A knock means more bad news about economic growth slowing to a crawl, about oil and food prices shooting through the roof—about how slashing interest rates has not helped after raising interest rates has not helped—about the S&P double downgrade, about inflation, joblessness, homelessness—about how angry everyone is, how very angry, his approval rating at 30 percent. This is all his fault, they say. Violence begets violence. If he worked more on integration, the Resistance would have nothing to resist. And now it is too late. And now a section of the country and the populace has been carved away as if by a knife. His efforts to reclaim the Ghostlands are pointless, a waste of money and resources. The other day the
New York Times
ran a column that referred to cleanup and antiterror efforts in the Pacific Northwest as “a lost battle. Like raking leaves in the wind.”

Again the knock at the door. More of a thud really. As if someone has hurled an arm against it, demanding to be let in. Rather than answer it, he stands looking out the window. A guard with a German shepherd patrols the lawn. A cherry tree snows blossoms that appear in the moonlight as white as shredded paper. The moon hangs like a cool blue disc in the sky. He cannot see any stars, not with the glow of the city all around him, but he discerns a red light, what must be Mars.

Maybe the knock is not bad news after all. Maybe it is one of the whores back for a forgotten earring. Maybe it is an agent who heard Chase ripping apart his room, who wants to confirm the president is all right and ask whether he would like something, maybe a sandwich or maybe housekeeping to help him put everything back in order.

The door opens and Buffalo stands for a moment at the threshold of the suite and the light from the hallway throws his shadow clear across the dark room and makes him appear momentarily as tall as a giant. “Chase?” he says and fumbles for the light switch.

“Leave them off.”

Buffalo’s hand drops to his side. He lets the door swing closed behind him and squints into the darkness, his eyes unadjusted. “Something wrong?”

“Nothing,” Chase says. “Everything.”

Buffalo trips over the ghostly heap of the duvet. “I can’t see worth a damn, you know that.” He snaps on a floor lamp and then shakes his head at the spilled folders. He crouches down and then gives up on tidying them and retrieves the fallen lamp and sets it on the table again and tries to adjust its broken shade before illuminating it. His glasses glow gold. “We may have something on Balor.”

“Go ahead.”

“The Pittock Mansion. In Portland. We’re not one hundred percent, but the satellites have picked up a lot of activity there.” He explains the need to act. He says what he has already said a dozen times before: that
this
is their moment, following the containment of the territories and disablement of all infrastructure, to put maximum pressure on the lycans. “They’re up against the ropes. If we keep up the pressure, we’ll cripple them.”

They have been through all of this before. How they need to make Balor their priority. How they need to cut off the snake’s head. How the Resistance will convulse awhile, but then go still.

Now that Jeremy Saber is out of the picture, Buffalo tells him, their number two seems to be Jonathan Puck. From England. Twice deported. Twenty-seven convictions. Theft, assault, rape, narcotics, unlawful intimidation, possession of an illegal firearm. “And—get this—he’s five-two. A little big man. No chance somebody with that kind of stature or temperament can lead or galvanize all those moving parts.”

Buffalo could talk all night. Chase cuts him off. “Send our guy.”

“I was going to suggest a missile strike.”