Red Moon (44 page)

“No military. They fucked up twice already. Blasting their way through that elementary school full of Mexicans. Bombing that dam and flooding a whole goddamn town of people.”

“We’re not talking about people. We can’t think of the insurgents that way.”

“News fucking chopper overhead with all those bodies floating around like cordwood. Quiet and clean. That’s how we’re going to do it.”

“Are we?”

“Send him. End of discussion. I want a severed head to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.” Chase silences any further argument with a lashing gaze.

They both take a step away from each other, and they are heavy men now, so the floorboards whine beneath them. Buffalo observes him worriedly and removes a pen from his pocket and bites the tip as if it were a pipe stem. “Is everything okay?”

Chase remembers the roar of the toilet, the confetti twirl of the pills as they vanished down the drain. He thinks about telling Buffalo. Telling him he wants to get clean, just for a little while. Flush the system. See if the old Chase comes wandering out of the fog. But he can’t. That’s what Buffalo will tell him—he can’t. And he is tired of being told what to do. “Everything is fucking awesome. Can’t you tell?” Chase cannot meet his eyes. He studies the floor, where the lamps staggered around the room entangle their shadows.

“You should be happy. Be happy. This is what we’ve been working toward. All these years.” His voice is small.

“This?” Chase says. “This is what we’ve been working toward?” He sweeps an arm to indicate the mess in his suite, the ruins surrounding them. “You can have it.”

T
HAT MORNING
, before the sun breaks the sky, Patrick creeps out of his bunk and shoulders his backpack—stuffed with a poncho, canteen, a few MREs and Snickers bars, GPS, satellite phone, waterproof matches, iodine tabs—and hurries to the vehicle lot. Yesterday, outside the mess hall, Malerie confirmed her assignment and plate number. She and another nurse would be in a medical supply van crushed into a long line of Humvees and FMTVs, a cleaner convoy headed into the Ghostlands. In the vans, Malerie said, there is a hollow beneath the bench seat for extra storage. A hollow big enough for him to cramp his body inside.

He told her thank you and she said he better not fuck up and he said he wouldn’t.

They stood in silence awhile and then he said, “Well, I guess that’s that.” It was as close to good-bye as he could get. He blew her a kiss.

“Missed,” she yelled, like he was far away, not ten feet from her—and then, unsmiling, she crossed her arms and walked away.

It is here, snapped under the seat with a crossbar pressing into his forehead, that he waits for the next hour, until the sun rises and the trumpet calls and everyone climbs out of their rack and voices busy the air and the doors chunk open and closed and someone settles onto the seat above him and the vehicles all around the lot roar to life. He cannot fill his lungs completely—that’s how tight the space is—and his neck is already cramping from having stared to the right for so long.

The van makes a series of turns, braking at the checkpoint with the rest of the squad, then rumbling up to speed as they head into the Ghostlands. Patrick cannot see out the window, but he knows the drive and can imagine it clearly as they cross the sage flats, the blacktop edged by red cinder, rabbitbrush rising from sandy washes like so many broom heads. Clouds wisp the sky. Turkey vultures ride thermals. Juniper trees twist upward like skeletons in torment. Black-and-red cinder cones hump the desert. Canyons are lined with basalt columns like ancient churches.

He counts off the seconds as they pass and imagines a clock inside him, a clock with many red and black wires curling out of it, that will eventually click its way down to zero and explode. He wishes they would hurry. Already he feels like he is too late.

The convoy stops in Prineville, where they have been ordered to sweep the east side of town for bodies, kill any insurgents, detain any illegals, and torch all markets and grocery stores. He mouths, “Come on, come on, come on, come on,” and waits an interminable amount of time as the van parks and the engine quiets and the nurses climb out and Malerie double-taps the door to give the all clear before he clicks the seat upward like a coffin lid and snaps his neck left, then right.

He hurls the brick into the display window of the Harley dealer and stands there with the glass all around him like the thousand jagged possibilities waiting for him in the Ghostlands.

The Night Train is a big bike, sixty-three horsepower. He wants to hurry but can’t help but pause a moment to run his hands along the curves of it, smear his fingerprints and fog his breath along the metal. He scores the keys from a hook in a locked office. There is a generator in the corner. He guns it to life. The shop has its own gas pump and he tops off the tank and fills four canteens he stores in the saddlebags.

Patrick left his hazmat gear back at the base. The full-body suit, gloves, and boots—made from a nano-composite material called Demron—shield him from gamma rays and radiation particles but slow him down, make him sweat. He will be gone only two days and he will pop iodine tabs every few hours to fight the radiation and he will stay away from the northern half of the state and hopefully the overall effect will be no more severe than him standing in front of a microwave for a few hours.

He rolls the Night Train into the lot, turns on the fuel supply, pulls out the choke, hits the ignition, sets the kill switch to run, releases the clutch. The growl of the engine has enough thunder to turn heads all over town. The cleaners will know someone is here. He has only a few minutes before someone comes hunting for him.

He wobbles onto the street in first gear—nearly stalling out—and then throttles forward. Once he gets onto Highway 126, he kicks his speed up to seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour, and the world blurs into a smear of colors and makes him forget, just for a second, who and where he is.

Outside town, he can see weeds creeping through the cracks in the asphalt, deer bedded down in an overgrown golf course. Nature thrives. Patrick has heard it all. How at night Multnomah Falls glows a faint red, as if the earth is bleeding. How raccoons, as bald as babies, overturn garbage cans and clamber through cupboards. Mountain lions slink about with tusks like sabers. Pterodactyl-like birds silhouette the open guts of the moon. An albino bear as big as a garbage truck sharpens its claws on a telephone pole.

Then there are the dogs. They run now in packs. They live in the woods and in the abandoned houses, cozying up to the couches and beds they were for so long forbidden to dirty. They come for him now, outside Prineville, at the bottom of a canyon, his engine’s noise drawing them from the juniper forest—ears perked, heads cocked—as if summoned. They give chase, wailing like demons, their dark shapes surrounding him. They pop their teeth and he kicks at them and nearly loses control of his bike. They keep pouring out of the woods—close to forty of them. He dodges their bodies like a halfback and zooms up and up and up the switchback highway that rises from the canyon, until he reaches its plateau, a viewpoint overlooking the dry basin of Crook County. He parks and gets off the bike, and sure enough, several hundred feet below him, gray and black and brown, the dogs race along the highway, following his scent.

Christmas is the last time he saw his mother. This was before he deployed for the Republic, and he spent a good deal of his holiday eating. Everything from cinnamon rolls to meatloaf to asparagus casserole, everything he could get his hands on and knew he would not taste outside a mess hall for a long time.

“Come back to me,” his mother kept telling him. His last day before climbing on a plane to Los Alamitos, California, she pumped his hand furiously, as if to distance her affection, and then couldn’t stand it anymore and drew him into a hug. When they pulled apart, she smiled a sad smile and touched his face. “Aren’t you scared?” she said, and he said, “Course I’m scared.”

And he was, but not anymore. That nerve seems to have been excised from his body. As much as he checks and checks, and keeps on checking, as far as he can tell, ever since he came back from the Republic, he has not been scared, not sad, not excited, not feeling much of anything, his numbness like armor.

Which is why he feels so surprised by the sour twist in his stomach when he roars up to his mother’s home in a squall of gravel. He is—no other word for it—afraid. For a long time he stands at the front door, not knowing what to do, studying for clues in the wood grain. When he finally steps inside, he does so with care, to honor the tomblike stillness of the place and also to keep from stirring the dust.

He tours each room, certain he will find his mother in one of them, and when he doesn’t, he feels no relief, only assent to his prolonged suffering, like a patient whose nurse cannot find a vein while repeatedly stabbing a needle into the crook of an elbow. He climbs on his bike and drives through Old Mountain, past the dump, to the wooded subdivision, where he discovers her at last.

They have been hanged, the doctor and his mother, his mother recognizable only by her clothes, her skin otherwise black or stripped from the bone by birds. The noose knotted around her neck rises seven feet to the thick branch of a juniper tree. She sways in the breeze and so does the doctor’s head. It hangs beside her, like some ghoulish ornament, but his body has long ago rotted away from his neck and fallen to the driveway, an angular pile of bones draped in weather-aged khaki. The smell of decay still clings to the air like some terrible perfume.

Across the garage door, in black block letters, someone has spray-painted
Go to hell lycans
. And beneath it, in smaller script,
Sincerely, The Americans
.

Patrick tries to sob but can’t pull it off, managing more of a cough. Then his face splits open as rocks do when water freezes inside them, and he begins to cry. He touches the corners of his eyes as if to push the tears back inside him. He hates how weak and helpless he feels. He hates it so much that he charges the juniper tree and kicks it and a loose branch falls and strikes his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise that will take a long time to shrink and pale and vanish.

T
HE LYCANS
are not alone. There are others—Mexicans mainly—who live in the Ghostlands. Like Claire, most are here because they feel they have nowhere else to go. At the perimeter, once the military discovers they are undocumented, they will be jailed and then deported. They could always return to the States by following a coyote through a dirt tunnel and across the desert. But why? The invisible threat of radiation, the sores that fester on their skin, mean nothing compared to the overcrowding, the joblessness, the anemic economy, found everywhere else.

They do not have access to iodine. Their hair is falling out. They are covered in radiation burns. But they also drive Mercedes and BMWs and Land Rovers. They shop at the abandoned Nordstrom and Macy’s. Some live in gated subdivisions, in five-
bedroom
homes furnished by Pottery Barn, but most have stuck to the farms where they once worked, where they know the land from which they can harvest their apples and filberts, lettuce and grapes, raspberries, carrots, eggplant, sweet potatoes. A sustainable life.

A week ago, Claire and Matthew happened upon fifty people hoeing and seeding fields. The way they were dressed, you would have thought it was a cocktail party. At the edge of the field an old man in a tuxedo rocked in a rocking chair, his beard as white as corn silk. When they turned off the highway and biked down the long clay road that led to the fields, the old man rose unsteadily from his chair, lifted what appeared to be a cane, and fired. A yellow carnation bloomed from the front of the shotgun, followed by the roar and spray of buckshot that from a good fifty yards’ distance only stung their skin. They turned back the way they came.

This is where the girl comes from—a farm, she says—a farm outside Salem. Her name is Roxana. “Roxana Primavera Rivera,” she says in a proud, careful voice like she might have once used in a classroom. She is nine and a half. She was in the third grade before the sky caught on fire, before everyone abandoned this place. She hates math but loves reading. That is all there is to do anymore, she says, is read. Besides work. She has the whole library to herself and loves sexy vampire books especially. Her parents are dead—shot by soldiers when on a supply run. Her uncle takes care of her now. He is a pretty scary man, she says, her
tío
. Everyone is afraid of him. “But he’s nice to me.”

She talks breathlessly while they ride their bikes along the back roads, Claire on her eighteen-speed Trek, Roxana on a Huffy with pink streamers that sizzle in the wind. They found the bike in Bi-Mart, along with a grandpa-style pocketknife, a box of bullets, candy bars. They have pedaled maybe ten miles when the girl asks why they can’t just drive a car, and Claire tells her what Matthew once told her: “Because gas is hard to come by. And because in a car you can’t hear what’s coming.”

Her voice is scolding and impatient. She wishes she’d never found the girl. She is just one more thing to deal with, to worry about. If she had died in the cemetery, she would have died in the cemetery. She would have been another body. As simple as that. But now, if anything should happen, her death will belong to Claire like a diseased limb. So she must deliver the girl safely back to her family even as other thoughts occupy her mind. She sees, in the prickle of grass, in the bunching of clouds, the knots on a tree, the vision of Balor, and she imagines how she might get close enough to him to drag a blade across his neck or punch a bullet through his body.

She knows he is here—in Oregon, in Portland—feeding and supplying those loyal to him, trying to build an army, declaring this their rightful sovereign territory. She has seen
GOD BLESS THE RESISTANCE
graffitied across the capitol building, seen posters declaring this place Lycanica. She knows that’s why drones and choppers buzz overhead, why missiles sometimes come streaking out of the sky to open up the earth. He is being hunted.

This winter she and Matthew met someone—a man with a ratty beard and soiled North Face jacket who came out of the night to join their campfire. He held up his hands and said he only wanted some company. “I’m cool,” he said. “I’m one of the good guys.” And he was. There were many in the Ghostlands Claire knew would slit her throat, rip off her clothes—and that’s why she and Matthew always kept their guns at their waists—but the criminal element was offset by men like this—Robbie, he said his name was—political idealists and peaceable foragers more interested in lying low and living their own lives than getting caught up in a war against humanity.

He shared some whiskey with them that they drank out of tin cups. After they stared into the fire for a long time and bullshitted about their pasts, Balor came up. Robbie said he’d seen him. There had been a gathering at the fairgrounds in Salem and Balor fed them before taking the concert stage, speaking with an evangelical rise and fall to his voice about their country. That’s what he called it, their country. And their country would grow.

Another few miles and the girl’s bike begins to wobble. “My legs hurt,” she says. The sun sinks lower in the sky and retreats behind some clouds and glooms the air. A part of Claire wants to tell Roxana to suck it up and keep pedaling. She feels the need to get as far away as she can from the fresh mound of dirt in the cemetery, the town that swallowed Matthew. But another part of her knows she needs to stop, and stop soon, find a place to hunker down for the night. On her own, she might ride until her muscles cramp or her tire flattens, not caring where she ended up, only wanting to move, to sweat out her sadness, her feet spinning in circles. But she has someone else to worry about besides herself.

Soon after Roxana says, “Now my legs hurt
and
my butt hurts,” they find a farmhouse a quarter mile off the road and dump their bikes behind it and check the rooms for bodies, dead or alive, then sit on the porch swing and watch the sky darken.

Claire digs a Baby Ruth out of her backpack and asks if Roxana wants a bite. The girl holds out her hand and says, “Please,” and Claire breaks off a piece and tosses it to her and she eats it with smacking openmouthed chews. She smiles, her teeth just a little buck, and Claire tries to make her smile as genuine as hers and
cannot
.

They take swigs from a Nalgene bottle—the water soured by iodine—and it is then, when the girl throws back her head and drinks greedily, that Claire notices the raw red necklace encircling her throat, like the imprint of a leash. “What happened?”

The girl screws the bottle shut and touches her neck and says nothing. Just as she said nothing when Claire first asked how she ended up separated from her family, only shook her head, hid behind her hair.

The house is thick with dust that makes them sneeze into their elbows. Claire snaps on her flashlight. It carves away the darkness. The kitchen has an apple theme—apple wallpaper, apple dish towel, apple hot pad—that makes her imagine a woman with a silver helmet of hair clapping flour off her hands and humming church hymns. Flower-bordered dishes mucked with mold remain in the sink. They walk a short hallway, to the living room, where her light flashes off the screen of an old Zenith television and then slides across an oak coffee table, a ratty recliner, a couch with a red-and-yellow afghan draped over its back. “You sleep there,” Claire says and the girl asks why, why not on a bed?

“All the bedrooms are upstairs.”

“So?”

“Only sleep on the ground floor. Better exit strategy. Just in case.”

The floor isn’t very comfortable, but that’s not why Claire can’t sleep. She can’t sleep because of Matthew. She imagines the grayness of his skin when she flopped that first shovel of dirt on him. She imagines the worms tunneling toward him like so many eager tongues. She imagines what he looked like when she found him on the front stoop, wide-eyed and surprised, his mouth a black O. She wonders what the hot rush of metal felt like when the bullets pricked his skin, and then the internal blossoming of blood as flesh gave way and bone shattered, as the back of his head opened up and ejected what looked like a handful of rotten watermelon. Did he have time to hurt? Did he feel the wind whistling through his newly rendered cavities before he lost consciousness?

Every time she falls into dreams, the image of him emerges from the dark, and she wakes with an asthmatic gasp, squeezing her hands into fists so hard the fingernails cut little half-moons of blood into her palms. She recognizes a similar sort of haunting in Roxana. In her dreams she wails, sometimes softly, sometimes at the top of her lungs.

For a while Claire just lies there, listening. Then she says, “Shut up,” her voice barely audible, a quiet curse. Then she gets up and stumbles to the bathroom and pees in the empty toilet. She checks the locks on the doors, peers out the windows into a blackness that tells her nothing. Then she stands over Roxana and squeezes her shoulder and whispers, “Hey? You okay?” But the girl won’t respond. She goes on moaning and Claire goes back to pacing.

After another hour of this, she wants so badly to silence and comfort the girl that she scoops her up and holds her in her arms, tight against her chest, rocking her, saying
shhh
. She doesn’t know if the girl wakes up or not, but her complaining softens to a sort of purr and her muscles relax and after a good fifteen minutes Claire sets her down and covers her with an afghan and falls asleep kneeling beside her.

The next day, in the midafternoon, they find the farm without too much trouble. Roxana knows it is near a river, knows it runs up against a big woods she pronounces Aching Knee. Claire consults the map until she finds the Ankeny refuge—and now they circle the roads around it until the girl says, “
There!
”

A gravel driveway cuts through a wall of oak trees. Beyond it are newly disked fields, the dirt as black and porous as the heart of a chocolate cake. The driveway is lined by what first appear to be decorative fence poles, every ten feet or so, with no barbed wire strung between them. These turn out to be pikes run through severed heads. Their mouths hang open. The sharp ends of the sticks sometimes peek out of their sockets or pierce the tops of their skulls like horns. Flies buzz and taste the rank flesh and explode like the spores of a black dandelion when Claire and Roxana pedal past them.

Her hand teases the brake. The bike coasts. “What the hell is this?”

Roxana says, “Those are to keep the bad people away. The wolf people.”

“Is that what your uncle said?”

“
Sí
.”

She did not ask for this. She did not want to help the girl. And now look at what she has gotten herself into. Everything in her body tells her to spin around, hammer away from here, but her feet and her mind spin alike when the bike carries her up a grassy rise on top of which squats the house—two stories, black shutters, white siding with the paint flaking off—like a mildewed skull. There is a faded red barn, a whitewashed cinder-block milk house, a pole shed for machinery, a woodpile, three grain bins. Claire can see people working the fields, maybe two dozen of them spread out over ten acres. Two trucks are parked in the driveway and Roxana drops her bike next to them and takes off running for a vegetable garden in which crouch two men and a woman.

She calls out to them and they stand and shade their eyes with their hands and then let out a cheer and embrace her one by one and then Roxana points at Claire and they study her and raise their hands in hesitant waves and cram together in a huddle and finally decide to approach her, slowly, nodding too much and smiling too big, as if trying to convince themselves she isn’t a threat.

They wear revolvers and so does she. The gunmetal catches the light on this sunny morning, advertising the possibility of violence, but they only want to talk, telling her thank you, thank you, for bringing the girl back to them. “How is this possible?” says one of them, a broad-shouldered, broad-hipped woman with a gap between her teeth. “
Tú eres un fantasma
.”

They stand in awkward silence another moment before asking Claire in their broken English what news she has from the outside, if any.

“
No sé nada
,” she says. Which is true. She knows nothing. No Internet, no TV, no radio, the newspapers moldering on porches and in kiosks all dating back to November 6. Which sometimes makes it hard to believe that the world continues to spin, that a thousand miles from here somebody might be drinking a latte in a coffee shop and updating their Facebook status on their smart phone.

Once they realize she speaks Spanish, they all start talking at once, their hands gesturing, flapping like brown birds, which to Claire is what they sound like.

She says, “
Lento, por favor. Lento
.” They are too quick and too complicated for her, but once they slow down, she can make out their halting queries about where to find food, gas, whether or not the military will hunt them down.

They don’t seem capable of evil. They simply appear trampled. One is an old man whose sun-weathered face could use an iron and whose hand rests on his revolver as if comforted by it. The other is a young man—just a teenager, really—with lamb-chop sideburns and radiation lesions on his face. His arm is in a sling and blood-soaked gauze has been duct-taped around his biceps. He says his name is Jorge and when Claire asks what happened to his arm a silence sets in like after a dish drops at a restaurant. Jorge brings a hand to the bandage and says, “I try to save Roxana. When the wolves take her.”

Roxana drops her gaze. The gap-toothed woman makes a clucking sound and pets the girl. Now Claire understands. The bruises around her neck. The whimpering nightmares.

“You are not a wolf, yes?” the woman says. “
No es posible
.”

Before Claire can say anything, a rumble comes from overhead and they all squint up into a sky filled with cirrus clouds that look like pale fish bones. Here they spot a fighter jet. Its sound strikes Claire as sad, something far away and going farther. A moment later the plane vanishes over the coastal mountains, its contrail dissipating behind it.