Red Moon (50 page)

They make their way methodically through every room on the ground floor, killing two others, before climbing the stairs. Someone fires down on them and they toss a grenade onto the landing and duck down. Plaster clouds the air. The ceiling cracks. In the dusty silence that follows the blast they continue upward. There is a metal gate secured at the top of the landing, and then another at the doorway to a master bedroom at the end of the hall, both of which they blast through with C-4 charges.

He sits on a walnut sofa with green velvet cushions and a floral crest. He wears a white linen shirt unbuttoned at the top to reveal a silvery thatch of hair. His legs are crossed. His hands are folded in his lap. He disappoints Max. He does not race at them. He does not cower. He simply sits there, staring into the empty fireplace, until they surround him. He then looks up with a dispassionate expression, ignoring the shotguns aimed at him, staring into each of their eyes.

“You’re him,” Max says.

“Who?”

“
Him
.”

“Yes. I suppose I am.” He sighs through his nose and stares again at the fireplace. “It’s too late, you know?”

“Too late for what?” Max says.

“You’ll see. Soon enough you’ll see. It’s already happening.” One of his eyes is the blue-silver of sage, the other the purple of an old bruise.

“I used to be like you, you know,” Max says. “But then I learned something. I learned that talking is one thing, doing is another.” He reaches for his boot and unsheathes the knife there. “You want to do some real damage, use fewer words.”

The knife, Max notices, catches the sun and throws a bright blade of light onto the couch. He turns the knife and makes the light slide along the cushions, along Balor’s thigh, up his torso, trembling across his face until it settles on his eye, his decayed eye, which glows for a moment like a dying star.

They find stores of gasoline in the carriage house. They splash it along the walls, soak pools of it into the rugs, waterfall it down the stairs. Their eyes tear over. The fumes make them dizzy. They cough and laugh at once.

They make a trail of gasoline through the foyer, down the porch, along the brickwork path, to the driveway, where Max lights a match. “Time to clean house,” he says. The match falls sizzling from his fingers and the gas ignites with a huff. A tongue of blue-and-orange flame licks its way speedily into the mansion.

It isn’t long before the windows explode and the fire rises through them and the brick around them blackens. Sparks swirl. The roof vanishes in a snapping crown of flame. The heat is tremendous. Everyone staggers back. Smoke shadows the sun. And a smile plays across Max’s face as he runs his fingers through the new scalp at his belt, petting it, the hair long, with a light gray sheen, as if woven from silver.

How many have been killed?—what happened to Claire?—is he being followed? Patrick doesn’t know; he doesn’t know. He can see some way into the woods, but no farther, the air still dim with dawn and everything thickly tangled, draped in moss, ornamented with fungus.

He pops the clip, checks to see how many rounds remain in the Ruger. One. One bee sting of a bullet. He tries not to think about all the different kinds of fucked he is right now. The ground slopes beneath him into a bowl-like depression with a long-dead fire ring at its center, someplace teenagers used to come to drink beer and smoke cigarettes and get lucky. Cigarette butts, faded chip bags, the dried husks of condoms. He steps on an empty can of Busch Light and startles at the metallic complaint.

He sees, carved into the bark of a tree, names and hearts and promises, and among them, in huge block letters, someone has scratched out
FUCK YOU AND YOUR LOVE AND HAPPY HANDHOLDING HORSESHIT
. Patrick listens to the gunfire still shouting behind him and feels a brief but profound surge of hate, hatred for people in general, their destructive urges.

This is who he wants to hand the vaccine over to, the same sort of creature that sprays down a campsite with an M4, that guns down a pack of lycans and then collects the scalps, that defaces a tree garlanded with declarations of love.

Amid the trash on the forest floor he spots a shattered pink cell phone. It hits him then: this is how they found him. He throws down his backpack and digs around until he finds the satellite phone. He sets it on a log and claws up a sharp-headed rock from the fire pit. He holds it aloft for a long moment. This phone is his tether to the other world. He imagines what awaits him there, the gauntlet of photographers, the cell where he will face interrogation. He cries out when he brings down the rock and shatters the phone into hundreds of glittery pieces.

For a moment he considers doing the same with the vaccine. He unrolls the watch cap and studies the vial in his hand.

It is then that he hears a branch snap. Behind him.

When he spins around, he sees only the graffiti-riddled tree. It has died and rotted from the inside out, its base hollowed like an empty eye socket that seems to follow him when he shoves the vial in his backpack and throws the pack over his shoulders and approaches the tree. He circles the trunk with his Ruger ready, his finger off the guard, on the trigger.

Then a man—helmeted, dressed in a utility uniform—steps from behind a tree.

Patrick falls back and raises his pistol just as the man brings the buttstock of the rifle to his shoulder. They stare at each other through their sights before slowly letting the noses fall and point at the ground. “You know who I am?” the man says. “Hoo-ah?”

It takes Patrick a moment. To see past the beard. To make sense of him in this context. And then it clicks, the voice, the face he has observed so many times on the television, the newspaper. “Yes, sir.” He wonders whether he ought to salute. “Hoo-ah, sir.”

Chase Williams. His president.

“We were supposed to have that photo op in the Republic, but you didn’t wait for me. You took off. Sort of like yesterday at the recon site. And sort of like ten minutes ago when we were trying to extricate you. You have a habit of not being there when people need you.” He is smiling without humor. “You got the vaccine?”

It takes Patrick a long time to nod, but he does.

“And you have the papers. Desai’s papers. And his laptop? You said you had them.”

Again he nods.

Chase smiles so broadly that he squints. “I’m grateful to you. I am. And you don’t need me to tell you this—you wouldn’t have come all this way if you didn’t know—but your country will soon be grateful to you; the human race will soon be grateful to you.”

The gunfire has ceased. The forest is silent and so is Patrick.

“You’re worried,” Chase says. “You’ve broken some rules. But know what? I’m a rule breaker myself. And I’m going to make sure nothing bad happens to you. I’m going to make sure only good happens to you. You’re going to be rewarded. We’re going to get you in front of some cameras. You and me. That’s what people need right now. They need somebody to cheer for, and you’re somebody to cheer for.”

Sunlight breaks through the canopy and lights up this pocket of forest. Patrick does not cry. Nor does he run. Though he wants to. To forget, if only for a moment, he closes his eyes. The sun backlights the blood vessels in his eyelids so that he sees a wash of red with dark roots creeping through it.

That’s it, he thinks. That’s how it ends. Quietly. No gunfight. No fistfight. No yelling and pleading. He can see it all so clearly, him handing over the vaccine. He could end it. He could end it all right now. As easy as that.

“How about you let me see the vaccine?” Chase says in a voice with cracks running through it. “How about you give it to me?”

Patrick then notices his skin trembling, his muscles jumping. The president looks like one of those old stop-motion movies, moving too quickly and jerkily. A drop of blood gathers at the corner of his eye and streaks down his cheek, vanishing into his beard.

Patrick is stepping back—he is shaking his head—when he says, “You’re one of them?”

Chase seems not to hear him. “You’re already a hero.” He lifts a palsying hand from the stock of the rifle and reaches for Patrick. “You can remain that way.”

“Not interested,” he says.

Somehow Patrick finds her. He sees the smoke obscuring the sky, the ash tumbling from the cloud of it, and he walks until the hill rises into a point to find some vista, to get some perspective. He discovers her there. She stands on a lip of basalt overlooking a crevasse. The sky is behind her, and her windblown hair curls in every direction, as if she were floating in a big blue spread o
f water
.

He has pored through the notebook and all those old emails—and his father and Desai have conducted their exhaustive research—each of them longing for interpretation, believing in their own way that they might find some answer to the impenetrable and make right the world. But when Patrick looks at Claire, when he feels that high-pressure need, it all seems suddenly beside the point, every pharmaceutical formula and utilitarian equation irrelevant.

She does not seem to notice him approach. Her eyes are on the crevasse. The tops of trees spike toward her. The wind, a mere breeze moments before, now gusts. If he had been wearing a hat, it would have blown off. She tips toward the open air before catching her balance. He says her name twice before she glances his way.

“Can you get away from there? Please? You’re making me nervous.”

She squints at him for a long moment before doing as he says, taking one step, then another, away from the long drop.

These past few months his heart has all but disappeared into a dark corner of his chest, a tiny flickering speck, but with her before him, the wind now feels as though it is fanning an ember, blowing it into a spark.

She calls out a question to him, but the wind rises and dashes her words away, and Patrick does not hear her. “What?”

“You should go.”

“What if I want to stay with you?”

“We’re different. Don’t you remember? That’s what you wrote to me once.” There is a mixture of assault and resignation in her voice, and she looks at him, then looks away, as if she regrets what she said as soon as she said it. “You were right.”

“No,” he says. “I was wrong.”

He holds out a hand to her then. Along the forearm, in the shape and color of a lipsticked kiss, is a bite mark.

Patrick had only one bullet. Killing Chase would accomplish nothing. His body would fall. Within a minute, drawn by the gunfire, soldiers would appear, knotting around him, knocking him to the ground and flex-cuffing his arms and legs, transporting him to the perimeter, an assassin.

So he lifted his pistol and fired it into Chase’s foot. The bullet punched through the leather and blood instantly welled from it. Chase widened his eyes and howled and fell backward and cradled his foot. “I can’t believe you did that,” he said, heaving a breath between each word. “I can’t believe you would do that.”

His entire body began to shake. He brought his hands to his face and stared at Patrick through the fingers. When his hands fell away, it was as though he had snatched off a mask, his face different, his mouth bloody and too full of teeth. He seemed not to notice his injured foot when he rolled forward in a crouch—and then launched himself at Patrick.

Their bodies became a mess of limbs, rolling over and over, so that Patrick could not distinguish up from down except when his face crushed into dirt. His backpack jabbed into his spine. Somehow he managed to short-punch Chase in the throat. The president coughed and choked and lost control of his body so that Patrick could knee him in the groin. His body went limp and Patrick shoved him away, separated himself, crabbing backward in time to hear voices and footsteps crashing through the forest.

He spied the rotten tree and scrambled into its dark entry. He barely scraped into the space with his backpack, shimmying upward, not caring what spiders or bats might wait for him, only wanting to be out of sight.

He was not sure what happened next. He heard the soldiers screaming their commands and Chase snarling in response. He heard a single gunshot followed by a cry of pain that trailed into a whine. He heard Chase struggling with them as they secured his wrists and ankles. He heard the helicopter hovering overhead and the trees moaning when they swayed and dropped cones that thudded the ground like grenades.

And then he heard nothing, and when he heard nothing for long enough to feel safe, he crawled out of the tree. Except for a few spots of blood, the ground appeared swept clean. As though nothing had happened.

He swung off his backpack and dug into it. He wanted to make certain that he still had the vaccine, that the vial had not been crushed, the bottom of his pack a mess of glass and powder. His hand closed around it—unbroken—but when he pulled it into the light he did not feel any sort of relief.

He was too distracted by the sight of his forearm. The gash there. Stamped with teeth. He had been bitten. Chase had bitten him. He stared at it for a long time.

Now his arm is extended toward Claire, and she reaches for it, not to take his hand, but to touch the gash with her fingertips. They come away tacky with blood.

His whole body is leaning toward her. As if he is asking for a blessing. She looks into his eyes. He is waiting for her to say something, but she only brings her mouth to the wound—and kisses it tenderly.

Then he says he has something else to show her—and her face hardens, betrayed from the possibility of a happy ending.

She does not ask any questions—she has no energy to do anything but follow him down the slope and into the zoo, past the dead animals in their cages, past the cool, still body of the Tall Man, to the color-coded, vine-strangled map. Patrick puts his finger on the veterinary offices and says, “There.” A few minutes later he kicks down the door and rips through the cabinets until he finds what he is looking for—two syringes and a container of diluent labeled
STERILE WATER
.