Black Moon (12 page)

One of the girls was wearing a tattered yellow prom dress. She could not be the cheerleader, Lila knew, because her hair was nearly black. The cheerleader, like Lila, had dirty blond hair. Another girl was wearing a one-piece bathing suit and running shoes. The third looked as if she could be going to school, with capri pants and a flowered blouse. She was holding a broken umbrella over her head, creating a circle of shade with a bite taken out of it on the ground. Everyone seemed to have a hammer or a hatchet, or even a monkey wrench, in their hand. They wavered where they stood, blinking at the light.

Without any apparent cue, the boy with the spear let out a
whoop and started running down the street. Everyone ran after him, including Lila. She did not know what else to do, nor could she tell if they were running with or after the boy. But if it led to food, she would play along.

She ran with this pack of sleepless youths past the end of the block and into a nearby field of dust, charging down the shallow remnants of vague furrows and past the gnarled wicks of long-dead grapevines, the sky a pale blue parachute above them, the vultures churning over the ribbon of concrete suspended on columns like an ancient aqueduct. They yipped and howled. The older boys seemed to be racing toward some unspoken destination, with the teen girls trailing, the smaller kids already falling behind and fanning out.

Lila ran hard, trying to keep up. Each step caused her head to pulse with pain, her thigh wound to flash hurt like lightning. But she had been a junior varsity soccer player at school and some of that was still with her now, in her muscles and the targeting of her steps, as they crossed a dirt road and started down a slope of quartz boulders. Below was an undeveloped stretch of washland—a field of speckled rocks and mustard stalk. Lizards darted off sun-baked boulders as they approached.

Sleep inside them, she thought. Tiny doses. Lila could hear their dry skittering in the weave of dead grass.

The kids stomped like wild horses through the terrain, now heavy-footed, breathing hard. No one was whooping now. They fell a lot, crashing to their knees, skidding in the dust. Soon it was just the older kids. They ran down old winding motorbike trails, through the brittle scrub, scaring up grasshoppers. The land gradually tilted toward the bottom of the valley. In the distance, a lone tree billowed darkly among the thistles.

They turned toward it.

Is that the wood for the fire? Lila wondered. Are they going to chop it down?

The tree was a massive old oak and, Lila could see as they approached, it held in its branches a sloppily built tree house. Really it was a mishmash of old cable spools, plywood, and two-by-fours hammered and roped together. There appeared to be a main platform, suspended like a crude porch about twenty feet in the air, where the trunk split into three massive branches. Higher up were some actual semienclosed and roofed platforms, perched like crow’s nests. Boards had been hammered into the trunk to serve as rungs of a ladder. Some of the tree house had already been dismantled and there were loose pieces of wood, prickly with rusty nails, among the layers of dead leaves all around the base of the tree. Not enough to build a fire, everyone seemed to know as they waited to catch their breath, standing stooped over in the shade of the tree.

Some of the smaller kids caught up and immediately started for the ladder. The boy with the spear pulled them down and started up himself, leaving his weapon propped against the elephantine trunk. The other kids followed while Lila lingered on the ground, hoping her head would stop hurting. The run had set her heart pounding, shooting pain through her scalp and down the side of her face. She delicately caressed her cheek, her face screwed up. Looking up into the dark branches above, she watched the boy in the lead reach the first deck, then start climbing toward one of the higher rooms. Others swarmed out over the deck itself and began hammering at it with rocks they had scooped up, or viciously attempting to pull up boards with their hands. She backed away as chunks of timber started flying down, bouncing off branches and landing in the dense compost of fallen leaves.

Crazy winged monkeys, she thought.

She had started for the ladder when a shout of raw anguish—of volcanic rage—came from above, followed by a scream. Lila flinched and backed away, knowing the sound. A sleeper had been discovered. Is it me? she couldn’t help wonder, panic coursing through her. She scanned the branches and followed the movement of kids as they stormed up one of the ladders, climbing like rats up a rope. High above them, where the boy with the spear had gone, there was a struggle taking place in one of the crow’s nests. Through the slats of the platform, Lila could see only hints of violent motion.

The boy continued to yell, a guttural, choking sound, as someone—it sounded like a woman—screamed,
“Get away from me!”

Then a body fell, scream trailing after it all the way down.

Lila could see that she was falling headfirst. A teenage girl. Lila turned away before the body hit and the screaming stopped. But the kids were still shouting from above. They threw their rocks and tools down at the body lying in the leaves. Lila backed away, then started running.

She ran back through the washland, using the overpass as a landmark. As she neared it, she heard claps of gunshot coming from above. They were killing something up there. She ran on, returning to the neighborhood, which again appeared empty. The house she had explored earlier was also vacant. She moved quickly down the hallway and into the cheerleader’s room, where she sat on the bed and began to cry. She fell forward on the bed and sobbed into the cheerleader’s pillow. It was just too much and it wasn’t fair that she had to do it alone. How was she supposed to stay alive in this totally messed-up world? It was her, she thought. It had to be the cheerleader sleeping in the treehouse, then screaming and falling. The hammers and rocks raining
down. She recalled the terrible soft thud the rocks made as they struck the helpless body, then shook her head violently, trying to work loose the memory, but was stopped by the pain it summoned.

She thought she heard someone in the hallway. Oh, crap. What if someone should come in? She wiped away the tears and looked for a place to hide. The closet made sense. She opened it and there was the mask, staring out at her. Eyes wide. Always open. Always awake.

WHEN
she emerged later that night wearing the mask, she was just as invisible as she had been before. No one questioned the unblinking eyes that covered her face. They were like badges, she thought. Sleepless people actually got out of her way, stumbling over one another. No one had the attention span or focus to investigate. A couple of kids leaned in, trying to see her face through the owl’s open beak, but it was too dark to see much of anything. What would they see anyway? Just two black eyes, the pout of her mouth. Dirty, tear-stained cheeks.

A fire was eating at the stacks of wood piled in the center of the cul-de-sac, casting a Halloween glow. But it had already lived out the most luminous phase of its lifecycle, having flared up and roared, throwing a column of smoke into the breezeless air, then settled into submission. Now the neighborhood people piled on what looked like skinned dogs, strapped with belts to heavy grilles—repurposed iron window grates. They hooked and dragged the grilles into position over the flames with golf clubs.

The smell of burning meat made Lila’s mouth water. She ventured closer to the fire and watched the neighborhood women turn the flayed bodies of birds on stakes. The birds looked like scrawny chickens. Then she caught sight of one of the heads when
it flopped into view. They were vultures, she could see. They had shot vultures. The dogs, she realized, were probably the coyotes she had seen strolling up the freeway on-ramp at dawn. Of course they had eaten their own pets, just as they had in her own desert neighborhood. But this cul-de-sac had been blessed with a great lure for living creatures. The pileup of speeding cars on the overpass, the bodies as bait. The scavengers came in to feed and now they were feeding on them. She retched inside her mask, her appetite gone.

She sat on the curb, her back against a feeble parkway tree, and watched what had become of the human race through the mesh eyeholes of the mask. At first glance, or maybe from a distance, she thought the scene could be mistaken for an end-of-summer gathering. A block party barbecue. With people standing around, sharing food, talking about how summer was ending and school would soon start. But the reality was no one was talking about anything. They seemed oblivious to one another as they gnawed on half-cooked hunks of meat. They wore bizarre assemblages of clothing, or no clothes at all. They squatted like apes to shit on a neighbor’s lawn or crouched to suck water out of a sprinkler.

She stood, head in a tiny globe of darkness, fronted by the same protective pattern found on the wings of butterflies and the flared hoods of cobras. She decided it was time to go. Drowsiness pooled behind her eyes, starting to press. It would be suicide to fall asleep here. What she should do was find a bike. She was only about two hours away from home by car, she figured. The desert lay beyond the wall of mountains. She could get there. Just follow the freeway back, up through the pass, right?

In her mask, Lila moved away from the fire, scanning the yard clutter for anything she could use. A map, maybe. She was
prodding at a file cabinet someone had apparently pushed out a window when she heard a groan.

She squinted into the darkness, into the backyard of a large house. Suspended between two trees, she could see the faint form of a hammock. It sagged, its middle swollen with the weight of a body. Again, a groan.

She edged toward it.

His face was also concealed, behind a slick mask of blood, but she knew it was the Marine driver. One eye was mashed shut and the other looked out at her from a gummy slit. She could see that his legs were strangely bent, propped before him. Blood bubbled from his flattened nose and his lips were flecked with shards of teeth. She winced inside the mask. They must have brought him here. Found him during the hunt and now here he was, abandoned, forgotten.

She cautiously moved closer, afraid that he might somehow rise up and grab at her like the last time she saw him. But other than the movement of his eye, he did nothing to acknowledge her. The mask, she thought. She reached for it, then paused. But how could he be dangerous? He was so messed up. Her throat clenched and she fought the impulse to cry. She couldn’t help feeling responsible. “Oh, man,” she said.

She slowly lifted off her mask. He seemed to watch, but again there was no change to his anguished expression. She thought then that maybe he was paralyzed. She brought up her hand, covered her mouth. She had thought to ask him where he had been taking her, or how to get home, but what came out instead was an apology.

“I’m so, so, sorry I fell asleep,” she said.

He couldn’t help trying to attack her, she silently acknowledged. That’s just how they get. Nothing could stop it—not even
the need to keep your eye on the road. Not even if the sleeper was your own daughter.

She was startled when his arm moved, dropping to his side. His hand began clawing at his thigh. It took a moment for her to realize that he was digging at the low pocket of his blood-soaked cargo pants. She waited for him to stop, but he persisted, groaning again. His eye darted from her face to the feeble business of his shattered hand. It pulled at the snapped flap, but failed to access the pocket itself. He wanted help.

She reached out and pulled at the flap until the snap released. She saw the white edge of an envelope. The Marine’s hand fell away and he stared up at her expectantly. She drew out the envelope and saw her name written on it in her mother’s handwriting.

The letter, which she read by the fire, told her never to return to the house. It said that they were already gone, that they went to sleep forever. Sleep! We will carry the memory of you, of every minute of your life, it said, into whatever place of dreams follows the terrible nightmare this world has become.

By the time she returned to the Marine’s side, he was dead.

THE TRANSACTION AT THE GATED DOORWAY
took longer than Biggs thought it should. He had to twist the ring off his finger. They tested the gold by biting it. The ring had a serious ding to it—the result of once falling six stories from their loft window. But they didn’t seem to mind its condition. Biggs did his best to maintain his sleepless pose, mumbling and swaying on his feet. They looked him over, saying, “Mother Mary time, but you got to leave the backpack with us.”

Biggs stalled. He didn’t know how to go about protesting this without revealing his lucid state, so he just violently shook his head. But they were already lifting it off him. “You’ll get it back,” they said.

He doubted this. But he could see how the pack itself could become a liability. The sleeping bag was practically an announcement. People would ask about it. No one else was walking around with luggage. He let it go. If Carolyn was in fact here, they would hike back to the loft and barricade themselves inside. After all, it was only a day’s walk away—shorter without all the wrong turns.