Red Moon (23 page)

T
HE CEREMONY IS
to take place at nightfall, only minutes away, the sun cutting the sky with one last blade of light before sinking from sight. The windows of Fox Tower and the surrounding mall and office buildings glow yellow. Pioneer Courthouse Square—known affectionately as the living room—is a tiered and bricked crater in the heart of downtown Portland. A full city block decorated with fountains, now dry, and potted plants, now empty, and edged with pillars and trees through which, like a tangled spiderweb, hang garlands and strings of lights. The light-rail rolls by, its bell mixed up with the bell rung by the Salvation Army volunteer stationed at the corner.

On this cold November night, thousands of people have gathered. Breath plumes from their mouths. They stamp their feet to stay warm. They wear fleece and wool caps and red-and-green holiday sweaters. Daughters in Santa hats roost on their fathers’ shoulders. Boys sip from paper cups of hot cocoa and ask, dozens of times, how long it will be until the lights come on, and their parents say, soon, soon. All eyes are on the dark-limbed seventy-five-foot Douglas fir erected in the center of the square.

A fat, white-bearded man in a Santa suit walks through the crowd, ho-ho-hoing and patting heads and handing out tiny candy canes wrapped in clear plastic and crouching down to gaze kindly at shy children who hide behind their parents’ legs.

The sky is clear, but when the wind rises, it appears to snow, ice crystals blowing off the buildings and trees, making the darkened air sparkle.

Reporters from KGW and KATU and KOIN, wearing red scarves and black peacoats, stand before video cameras on tripods. They say that any minute now, the governor will appear for the annual Christmas tree lighting, any minute now—and
wait
—they bring a hand to their earpieces and listen and look over their shoulders and say, here he is now.

He wears a cowboy hat, a sport coat, and jeans. His teeth are bared in a smile. His cheeks are reddened from the cold. He works his way down a set of stairs, flanked by a seven-man security detail. He shakes hands, claps shoulders. There is applause, but under the applause, some muttering, a few boos.

Another minute and he is at the bottom of the amphitheater, standing before a microphoned podium with a rounded top, its dark wood polished to a glow, making it appear like an upright coffin.

“It’s that time, friends,” he says, his voice becoming many voices that boom from speakers stationed throughout the square. “The most wonderful time of the year.” He takes in the sight of the tree, a black silhouette against a purple sky, and his eyes crinkle with seeming wonder when he talks of Christmas, the season of peace and giving, of goodness.

He makes no mention of lycans or of a presidential run or of any of the other sound bites he is so well-known for these days. Instead he talks about candy canes and sugarplums and the magic of the season and the gift of kindness. He talks about Christmas growing up on the cattle ranch. He quotes Charles Dickens. For a few minutes everyone feels good—everyone looks at him with kind crinkly eyed smiles—as if they each carried inside them invisible candles that he has lit so that the square seems illumined before he even flips the switch, as he does now, and everyone gasps with delight and applauds as the tree explodes with colored lights that chase the shadows from every face and make every wide-open eye glimmer like a star.

The choir from Oregon Episcopal, a group of teenagers dressed in red and black, gathers before the tree and sings, “Chestnuts roasting by an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose,” their voices as clear and bright as the pillar of light that rises behind them. Children sway and smile and husbands kiss their wives on the cheek and they hug arms around each other.

All this time a white windowless van circles the block. A decal along the body reads
DEDMEN PARTY AND CATERING SHOPPE
, a cluster of colored balloons rising above the black capital letters. The reflection of the Christmas tree streams across the black windows. The fifth time it circles the square, its engine shouts and it gathers speed and lurches sideways, off the street, into the square. Its tires thud over the curb.

The first few people don’t even have time to scream, hammered by the grille, lost beneath the tires, their bodies cleaved. And then, all at once, as if everyone is connected by an invisible string, the crowd comes alive with a collective shout. Bodies shake, surge one way, then the other.

The choir is still singing when the van drops into the amphitheater. Their voices call out beautifully—soon lost against the harsh metallic bang when the undercarriage first slams the brick. The noise that follows is like the crash and crunch and shriek of the heaviest toolbox in the world hurled down a stone stairwell. Yellow sparks, like those of a failed Zippo, spit from the wheel wells.

The van is nearly to the tree when, in an orange flash, it is gone. A great boom sounds. Blackened strips of metal fling through the air, the shell of the van peeled away by its explosive core, the flames fingering their way outward, seizing and igniting so many bodies, flinging fistfuls of nails and screws and stainless-steel balls that blister brick and concrete and tear through flesh like buckshot through a road sign.

The brightness of the explosion—which for a few seconds chases away all the darkness and brings a hellish daylight to the square—has been replaced by a charred and smoking crater. Bodies lie in heaps, some of them moving, some not, their skin blackened and marred by many strange openings like diseased mouths.

A woman sits on a bench; the top of her skull is gone. The grayish nub of her brain peeks out. Threads of blood run down her face and dampen her jacket. She seems unaware of her injury, staring into the glow of her smart phone as if deciding whether or not she ought to call someone.

A man staggers by nearly naked, the clothes shredded off him, what remains hanging in blackened and bloody tatters like old bandages. His genitals are missing and blood streams down the insides of his legs. Another man walks by with no nose, another with no teeth, another with no lower jaw, his tongue dangling from a ragged toothy cavity.

“Help,” says a woman in a Rudolph sweater. “Can somebody help me?” But even if someone could, she wouldn’t be able to hear them. Her eardrums have ruptured and made her red sweater even redder along the shoulders. Rudolph’s red nose—powered by a battery pack—blinks a distress signal.

Santa’s body lies sprawled out in the shape of an X. His head is missing.

Chase sits in the center of the square. He cannot hear anything except the ringing in his ears. Only
ringing
is the wrong word. This is more like screaming, the screaming of a thousand cicadas. Around him he sees all these victims, bloodied and charred, some of them crawling and some staggering and some motionless. He sees them through the roiling smoke, sees them lit with flame, and his concussed brain believes he is at war again.

A man rushes toward him, a man in a smoking sport coat. He carries a pistol. Chase vaguely recognizes him. His mouth is moving but all Chase can hear is the sound of screaming insects. Another man joins him. And then another. More and more come out of the smoke, crowding around him, opening and closing their mouths, but the only noise is this terrible insect rasp that seems to emanate from them. He would love to run away, but his limbs feel loose in their sockets. He would love to close his eyes and pretend they didn’t exist, but they reach out and touch him all over, trying to move him, to wrestle him up, and as they press upon him, he lashes out and screams something garbled.

He sees, through the smoke, in the deepening black of the sky, a crescent moon. He feels a heat rising inside him. For the past twenty-four hours, at Buffalo’s orders, he has not taken Volpexx. He needed to be
present
for the ceremony. So long as he stayed calm, everything would be fine, Buffalo assured him. They talked about breathing—peach in, green out—good in, poisons out. They talked about what to do in case of hecklers. They talked about enjoying the moment.

Chase can feel his heartbeat crashing in his chest, can taste the blood in his mouth, can feel the wolf turning over inside him. He is breathing out of his mouth and he is rolling onto his knees and arching his back when he feels a sharp stabbing pain in his left buttock.

He flips over with a shriek and finds Buffalo leaning over him, drawing him into a suffocating hug. He says
sh-sh-sh
. In his hand is a tranquilizer the size of a fountain pen. He has stabbed it into Chase and already he feels its effects, a dopey calmness overtaking him, numbing any fear or desire.

Buffalo. Chase studies his old friend. His enormous forehead is bleeding and Chase wants to ask if he’s okay but can’t manage the words. One eye of his glasses is sooted over, but the other is clear and in it Chase can see his reflection. Though the air is cold, sweat has sprung from his skin and he takes on a paler color so that there seems to be something about him already embalmed.

Two of the news cameras are still rolling. They will close in on the governor, and then swing suddenly away. There are a series of pops, like the gunshots of a .22, that draw their attention skyward, finally settling into wobbly focus on the tree, which has caught fire. It begins with a yellow edging along some of the branches. Then, as the fire eats its way quickly through the needles, the swish and snap of flame grow louder, overtaking the screams and car alarms and sirens in the distance.

The Christmas lights—big red and green and blue lights the size of bell peppers—explode, two pops, then six pops, then fourteen in rapid-fire—filling the air with tiny clouds of glass powder, sparkling and seemingly motionless.

In less than a minute the flames have overtaken the entire tree, now a towering cone of fire that breathes heat that sends the survivors scurrying from the square and melts the glasses and wristwatches and rubber-soled boots of the corpses left behind. A black cord of smoke coils upward, beyond the reaches of any skyscraper, to bring a tremendous black cloud to an otherwise clear sky.

P
ATRICK PARKS HIS JEEP
and sits with his hands on the wheel and the engine idling for a long time. The strip mall in front of him houses a Shopko, Supercuts, Pizza Hut, Old Mountain Liquor, and the Armed Forces Recruitment Center. This is December, six days since he turned eighteen and nearly a month since the three of them emerged from the caves, filthy and bloody and bleary-eyed, but alive. They drove down the mountain together, silent in the cab of the Ramcharger. Claire sat in the middle of the bench seat, her head resting on his shoulder. He remembers how he felt then, trembling with relief and excitement, so utterly alive.

Night had given way to day during their time underground. The rumble of the engine and the tick of cinders in the wheel wells and snow falling off a tree branch in a crystalline scarf and the sun flaring in the blue dome of the sky with little puffs of clouds hanging under it and the weight and warmth of Claire’s head on his shoulder came together to give him an overwhelming sense of peace and relief. The worst was over and new things were coming. A knot inside him seemed to loosen, unravel.

Until they pulled up to his house and discovered the sedan with military plates in the driveway. He did not say anything. He did not think anything. A dark instinct sent him leaping out of the Ram and storming toward the house. He pushed open the front door and stood in its dark rectangle and called out for his mother even as he saw her on the love seat with the two men seated on the couch opposite her, the CNO and chaplain in military dress with their hats in their hands and their biceps darkened by black bands.

His mother stood at the sight of him. “What’s happened?” they said at the same time. She was referring to his black lump of an eye, and he was referring to what really mattered, the reason her tears washed away her makeup. When she didn’t respond, he looked away from her, looked to the street, where through the glare of the Ramcharger’s windshield he saw the faint image of Claire looking back at him.

Just as he is looking now at the windowed door of the recruitment center, glazed with a cataract of ice, so that in a few minutes’ time someone outside could barely see a figure—whether a boy or a man, it would be too hard to tell—approach the reception desk and shake the hand of the officer sitting behind it.

T
HE TALL MAN STANDS
at the base of a mountain lost to the clouds. A long stream of footprints runs from the woods to the open mouth of the cave, the trail hard-packed from the weight of so many men. The ice-stiffened drapery has been torn away and tossed aside. Three agents in watch caps and Kevlar vests are stationed in this clearing, three more at the power station down the hill. The rest of his team, two dozen of them, stormed the lava tubes more than an hour ago and have maintained radio contact. “Clear,” they tell him. “There’s a lot of blood, but nobody here. Over.”

He holds the walkie-talkie to his mouth, close enough to lick it. “Nobody,” he says, not a question.

A burst of static and then, “They’ve gone and vanished on us.”

“No one vanishes. They’ve just blown off somewhere else.” His voice is soft and meditative, not meant for the walkie-talkie, which is already at his belt. “We’ll find them,” he says to himself. Something catches his eye and he crouches to pluck it from the stamped and polished snow at his feet. A twist of hair, bleached an unnatural shade of white. He kneads it between his fingers. Bits of skin dangle from the roots. He brings it to his nose for a sniff and then tucks it into his breast pocket and pats it. “And when we do, they’ll be dead.”

H
ER NAME
—rather, the name she goes by these days, Hope Robinson—is written in bold black capital letters on the manila envelope, a rumpled nine-by-twelve, folded in half to fit into her campus mailbox. There is no return address. The same as last time, the postmark comes from Seattle. The same as last time, quotation marks surround her name.

She knows people often punctuate incorrectly. “Employees must wash their hands,” a notice will read in a restroom, as if quoting someone, maybe the germ-phobic manager. But quotation marks around a name? That’s different, too strange to be anything but purposeful.

Last time, she opened her mailbox to find a standard business-size envelope, and when she ripped it open she found and unfolded a lined piece of paper that read
Boo!
Nothing more.

Now this. Claire holds the envelope with the tips of her fingers. When she flips it over, to see if anything is written on its back, she hears something solid slide around inside with a rasping noise.

She stands before the bank of mailboxes, a few thousand of them altogether, each numbered and decorated with a tiny window and brass knobs tarnished from so many years of fingers twirling combinations. Normally the mailroom is busy with jostling bodies and student organization booths requesting signatures and volunteers, but at this time of night, the space is dim and empty. She can hear voices and music filtering from another part of the student union, beyond the marble arches and down a hallway, where the Stomping Grounds coffee shop remains open until midnight.

She thinks about tearing open the envelope but feels too exposed. She tucks it into her backpack, along with her laptop, a spiral notebook. Her cowboy boots—slick black ones, Stetsons, a treat Miriam bought her before the move to Montana—clomp against the tile floors. The bulletin boards that line the walls are busy with flyers advertising bands, sketch comedy shows, student council candidates, lycan support groups. They flutter when she passes them on her way to the glass entry. She jars against the first door, already locked, and then hurries out the other.

The night is cool and bugs orbit the lampposts and make their pools of light appear like crazed water. She zips her fleece snugly around her. In front of the union sits a fountain with four wolves arranged around it, their mouths bubbling out arcs of water that splash into a greenly lit pool. The union is aglow with spotlights. She learned during orientation that it has been here as long as the university, since 1875, and appears on the homepage of the website and on the cover of the catalogue, all columns and Palladian windows and triangular pediments, its classical style so different from the rest of campus, the Nixon-era architecture, square, featureless, riot-proof buildings with cinder-block walls and windows that won’t open.

She follows the concrete path through the central quad to her dormitory. She keeps her hand closed around the knife in her pocket and her eyes on the bushes and pine trees clustered here and there, black shadows oozing around them. A blue-light security phone glows in the near distance, one of dozens positioned throughout campus. All she has to do is slam the red call button and one of the many guards patrolling campus will rush to her aid. They carry nets and Tasers and tranquilizers and pistols. This is supposed to make her feel better, but she does not. Dead dogs show up on campus every week. She has seen pentagrams spray-painted across the sides of buildings, choke chains hung from trees like tinsel. It has always been like this, she hears, but since the plane attacks and the courthouse square bombing, with anti-lycan sentiment at its peak, the campus is more than ever in the crosshairs. The other night Fox News ran a segment that questioned whether it was a training camp for terrorists.

Funny, given the reasons she enrolled. “You’ll be safer there.” That’s what Miriam told her. Safe with a new name. Safe with a new life. Safe among her own kind. Miriam owed that to her brother. She knew a network of lycans and sympathizers who helped open a bank account for Claire with a credit union and secure the required documents, the transcripts, the driver’s license and birth certificate and lycan registration. “Not good enough to get you on a plane, but good enough to get you into William Archer.” She helped dye her hair chestnut brown. She bought her the black-frame glasses from Urban Outfitters. For the next few years, Claire—no, Hope—needed to lie low and stay safe and abandon herself to her studies. “Forget the boy,” Miriam said. She rarely referred to him by his name, Patrick. To her he was “the boy.” And the boy betrayed them. The boy enlisted after his father disappeared in the Republic. Claire wanted to hate him for it, as Miriam did, but could not muster the energy.

Miriam would be in touch. She had business to attend to, and when Claire asked if that business had anything to do with Jeremy’s capture following the Pioneer Square bombing, Miriam said nothing—and has said nothing since August, the last time they saw each other at the Amtrak station in Portland, where Miriam gave her a stiff hug and said so long.

“Not too long, I hope,” Claire said.

This is October. Soon the cold will come and the bugs and leaves and grass will wither and brown and go white with the cover of snow. The campus is located near Missoula, in a bowl-shaped valley that butts up against the Rockies. Its location, combined with the architecture, makes the campus appear like a military compound.

A half-moon glows. The sky is a spackling of stars and a plane winks through them and makes her think of far-off places, Patrick. Damn him. Every now and then they email. Every now and then she would google his name and battalion, check for casualties, but only when she couldn’t help it. Her breath fills the air before her with ghostly steam that she then passes through. Her dorm is one of five, arranged like a pentagon with a bench-lined atrium at its center.

Her glasses fog over as she enters the building. Rather than wipe them off, she perches them on her head. The lenses are clear glass—she can see fine—but she knows that she ought to be more careful, knows that if she gets in the habit of absentmindedness, she will end up in trouble one of these days. She climbs the stairs and glances both ways down the empty hallway before keying open her door. She finds the light on but the room empty. Andrea is off somewhere, likely upstairs drinking with friends, despite this being a weeknight. Claire feels a mixture of relief and emptiness, the emptiness gnawing her out so that by the time she closes the door and shrugs off her backpack she feels like a chitinous husk that might crumble against the slightest pressure.

A stripe of moonlight runs across the wall. She squints into it when she collapses her blinds to keep the night at bay.

The wall next to Claire’s bed is blank except for tack holes and the gummy spots where tape once held posters in place. The books on her shelves are alphabetized. Her clothes are folded in drawers, the socks balled and arranged in colored stripes of white, brown, gray and black. She didn’t used to be this way. But after everything that has happened to her, she has decided if life is going to be messy, she needs everything else in perfect order. She knows it is only a stupid gesture toward stability and she doesn’t care: it makes her feel better.

For this same reason she can hardly abide her roommate, Andrea. There is a clear line that runs down the middle of the room, the floor on the other side barely visible beneath chip bags, lace bras and sweatpants and T-shirts, crushed cans of Diet Cherry Pepsi. Andrea has never made her bed, not in the two months they’ve lived together, the duvet always peeled back like a sneering mouth. The wall above it is a collage of magazine clippings from
US Weekly
and photos of friends on beaches or around campfires or at house parties, always with lips pursed, cheeks sucked in, always with arms draped around shoulders and beer bottles raised to the camera. It is this wall, more than anything, that makes Claire feel alone.

She is absent of pictures. Absent of history. Whenever she thinks about her parents and starts to feel sorry for herself, she tries to make the choice not to feel that way any longer.

She digs through her backpack and shreds open the envelope. The inside is a shadowy mouth that at first appears empty. She drops her hand in and her fingers close around something hard, a DVD that flashes when she pulls it into the light.

She slides the DVD into the slit on the side of the television. The screen goes dark. There is a click and a whir as the disc begins to spin. She has no idea what to expect, her mind as empty as the envelope she tosses to the messy floor. She crosses her arms and steps back and nearly trips over a tangle of clothes.

The screen brightens. She is looking at a building. The outside of what appears to be a motel, though she sees no sign. The camera shakes, a handheld. She hears no noise outside of the wind whistling against the mike. She can see very little besides the motel and its crumbly parking lot. Then she recognizes, with an intake of breath, the front end of a silver-and-black Ramcharger. It is parked before the last room at the edge of the brown one-story building. She can barely make out, above the roof, the green blur of trees. Then the camera zooms in on a door. From it hangs a silver number seven. The recording continues for a long time—what turns out to be five minutes but feels much longer—before the door jars open and Miriam steps out. Her hair is longer, pulled back in a ponytail, and she wears sunglasses, but Claire recognizes her stiff posture and locked jaw. She swivels her head, scanning the parking lot, before locking the door and climbing into the Ramcharger and barreling away. The camera lingers on the empty parking space another thirty seconds and then the recording ends.