Red Moon (39 page)

P
ATRICK IS LOOKING
for the woman named Strawhacker. Her eyes are scarred with cataracts, so gray they might have been spun by spiders. But she can see—that’s what people say. She can see things others cannot.

This is March—along the Idaho-Oregon border—where Patrick has been stationed the past few weeks at an FOB devoted to cleanup. Nearly five months have passed since, in the Republic, he came staggering back to Tuonela with his boots full of numbing snow, only to find most of the soldiers already departed. “Pack your ruck,” the guard told him. “We’re going home.”

“What?”

“The war is at home.”

His first assignment: a Nebraska tent city, outside Omaha, one of hundreds set up to accommodate the newly homeless and to quarantine the newly infected, many of them jeweled in sores and vomiting blood. Then the dead bodies started piling up. Then the riots began. For obvious reasons he hated it there, but the Nebraska sky bothered him more than anything. With no mountains to interrupt it, he felt blotted out, weighted down by its enormous size.

He requested a transfer into toxic cleanup and got it. It was the assignment no one wanted. They sent him home, to Oregon, to the place everyone else had fled, to join more than a hundred thousand cleaners already there. That’s what the military called the microbiologists and doctors and botanists and cleanup and construction crews: the cleaners. Many of them—some ten thousand—have since died from radiation poisoning, the gamma-ray intensity and the long-term exposure about as healthy as a shot of mercury to the jugular. Many more have vanished beyond the perimeter, presumed dead from lycan attacks.

This is where he needs to be. This is where he will find what he is looking for, what his father was looking for.

Tonight, in the high desert, the temperature hovers above freezing. Rain falls. Mud sucks at his boots when he tromps the streets of the FOB. The three-acre base was built around a deserted community center outside Ontario—fortified by Hescos and wrapped in hurricane wire—and he is headed outside the gates to a bar called the Dirty Shame. This is where he will find the woman, Strawhacker, who deposits herself there every evening to nurse whiskey and tell the fortune of any who seek her out.

Patrick feels like a fool but cannot help himself. Along I-84, near the security checkpoint, there is a gray-slatted barn that has become a billboard for the lost. Thousands of sun-bleached photos have been tacked to it. They streak in the rain and they flutter and tear away with the wind. People have written across them, in neat block letters,
Need to find my daughter
or
Have you seen me?
or
Worked for Nike
with emails and phone numbers listed. Patrick stapled a note there, too.
Missing
, it read. Beneath this are two names. Susan Gamble is one, Claire Forrester the other.

He has scanned the faces of the survivors—many of them lycans, sick from radiation or disenchanted with the Resistance after several months of living off the grid—who day after day still stagger through the checkpoint. He has tried calling his mother but only gets a recording that says, “This number is no longer in service.” He has tried emailing them both, but his messages go unanswered. He is not surprised. With few exceptions, once you step inside the Ghostlands—that’s what the media are calling it, the Ghostlands—you can no longer rely on electricity or phone service.

The wind rises and the rain blows sideways and he ducks under the dripping eaves of twenty plywood structures of the same boxy design, workspaces of the clerks, liaison officers, battalion, and company staff. SWA huts, GP tents. Then he passes the mess hall, as big as a barn, built as an extension off the community center kitchen. He can hear the KBR contractors inside, clattering pans, tocking their knives across cutting boards, getting ready for tomorrow’s breakfast. He holds his breath when he passes by a long row of Porta-Johns. They are stacked next to a tan tent the size of an RV, lit up from within, rowdy with laughter. He hears the snap and riffle of playing cards. Most of the sleeping quarters are like this, canvas topped with rows and rows of racks inside them, rucksacks and weapons littered everywhere. Generators groan. Lights sputter in the community center, home to the labs, offices for tactical planning.

He signs out at the gate and splashes a quarter mile along a heat-cracked county highway to the Dirty Shame, a tavern built into the side of a hill, a long windowless rectangular box of railroad ties with a sawdust floor and a mirror behind the bar with a bullet hole in it. The electricity here can no longer be relied on, so the meager smoky lighting comes from lanterns and candles that sputter and dance when he creaks open the door and peels off his poncho and shakes away the rain and hangs it from an iron hook.

Shavings cling to the mud on his boots. The oven-warm air smells like the creosote and formaldehyde the ties were treated with, the smell powerful enough to make everyone dizzy, along with the beer foaming out of mugs and curling down wrists, the whiskey shots lined up on the bar and slammed back with a gasp. There are thirty or so people drinking tonight, some soldiers, some civilians, who in this tight space give off a lot of heat and noise. He works his way through them to the bar, where he orders a beer and pays without any trouble. ID doesn’t matter in a place and time like this.

So many of the rules no longer apply.

Not very far from here, the perimeter fence begins, nearly three thousand miles of hastily constructed hurricane fencing that is practically useless and encases most of Oregon and Washington, some of Idaho and Montana, the length of it staggered with checkpoints and FOBs. Beyond the perimeter, the noise of traffic roaring, televisions blaring, cell phones ringing, Muzak trembling from shopping-center sound systems, all of it has ceased, leaving behind a scary silence.

Coyotes slink through the aisles of Safeway. Elks plod along the streets of Portland. In the fields and in the streets are semis and tanks and planes, rust cratered, the grass growing around them, looking like dinosaurs, fallen and decaying.

The lycans have carved out their own country, abandoning Volpexx, denying the xenophobic laws that in their collective choke collar felt more constrictive than all the prisons in the world, or so they said.

Patrick leans against the bar and drinks, hoping the beer will warm the chill from him. The bartender seems to have no neck, his head balanced atop his rounded shoulders. He wears a moth-eaten cable-knit sweater with the sleeves pushed up to reveal his meaty forearms. He collects two empty pint glasses and wipes the counter with a filthy rag.

Patrick looks beyond the bartender to the mirror behind him. Sometimes he hardly recognizes himself. Head shaved down to skin. Skin as brown as the high desert soil. Body lean, muscles sculpted like carved rock. He looks like a man even when he feels like a kid. He uses the mirror to study the faces around him. A woman with dream-catcher earrings and a high, shrieking laugh. A weak-chinned man in civilian clothes but with the standard-issue high-and-tight buzz. A Mexican with a handlebar mustache and cheeks pitted from acne. He spots a huddle of men standing around a corner booth, laughing, speaking to whoever sits there.

Patrick asks if that is where he will find the woman named Strawhacker, and the bartender says indeed it is, and Patrick wipes the foam from his lip before taking a closer look.

The light is so dim that at first he cannot see into the shadowy booth. Then the woman leans forward. Her face is as wrinkled as an old tissue, and her nose filamented with tiny red and purple capillaries. Her gray hair is cut boyishly around her ears. But her eyes are her most striking feature—milky puddles that seem with every blink ready to stream down her cheeks. On the table before her, a whiskey tumbler and a stack of tarot cards.

She is playing some sort of game with the men who stand around her. One of them pulls five dollars from his wallet and lays it on the table. Then he draws a card from the tarot deck, the middle of the pile, and holds it up for the others to study. Strawhacker goes rigid and licks her lips and finally says, “The Magician.”

The men gasp out their laughs and shake their heads and curse good-naturedly and Strawhacker steals away the five dollars and bids them good night and they leave her.

Strawhacker then sips her whiskey and looks at Patrick. They are ten feet apart, and Strawhacker has no eyes, but nonetheless Patrick can feel her dead gaze. His skin tightens into gooseflesh and he takes a step back.

“Where are you going?” Strawhacker says. “Please. Come here. Stay awhile.”

Patrick approaches the booth with his beer held like a pistol. The door creaks open as the four men depart the tavern, and he startles at the noise, some of the beer fuzzing over the rim of his glass to chill his wrist. A blast of wind hurries inside and makes the candle flames dance before the door slams shut.

“How did you know what card that was?”

“Just luck, just luck,” Strawhacker says and shuffles them with a riffling snap, neatens them into a pile. “Or maybe something more.”

The booth, too, is built from railroad ties, every inch of wood scarred from knives, people carving out their names and the names of those they love. There is a chair at the end of the booth and Strawhacker indicates that Patrick should sit there and he does.

“Some people come to me for games and some come to me for reasons more profound. I try to give people what they want.” She sweeps the stack aside. “You’re not here for games.”

“I’m supposed to believe you can see things?”

“You’ve come here, haven’t you? Part of you must believe. Yes, part of you must.”

“I don’t know what to believe.”

“It’s hard to know what to believe anymore. These are strange times. What I’ve discovered about myself is this: there’s a muscle in my brain that stretches open, like an iris maybe, yes, some diaphragm of muscle, and images soar through. It has no discernible real logic—but that’s my best explanation—it’s a spot to start from.”

“You talk like a crazy teacher.”

“You talk like an insolent boy.” She lifts her face in defiance, her chin protruding farther than her nose. Her voice is lower when she speaks again. “You want to know if I can see? I can see. I can see you colliding with another boy in center field after chasing a pop fly, can see the bone swell that made you limp for three weeks after. I can see you fingering a girl behind your middle school and then not washing your hand for a whole day to preserve that mysterious, intoxicating smell. I can see you shooting your first deer and putting your thumb into the kill wound and tasting the blood. I can see your father running out into a lightning storm to grab your teddy bear forgotten in the yard while you watched from the window. And I can see him now, a dead man in a faraway cave with bats roosting over his bones.” Flecks of spit fly from her mouth. “And if you want more from me than that, you’re going to have to pay up, like every other asshole.”

“God.”

“He won’t be able to save you. Not where you’re going.” Then her expression softens and her head tilts, as if she hears something. “What’s that book you’ve got in your pocket?”

Patrick can feel the weight of it now at his breast, his notebook, the one salvaged from the Republic. His father’s. He keeps it always in his breast pocket, over his heart, to touch now and then. It seems to pulse, as if made of nerves and muscle. He has always turned to his father to know what to do. Now the book tells him what to do.

“There’s something in that book, but I don’t understand.” Strawhacker holds out her hand, the fingers long and bony, the nails rimmed with dirt. “What’s in that book?”

“Shut up about the book. I came to ask you about two people.”

“Tell me what’s in that book and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

Patrick pulls out a wadded-up five-dollar bill and lays it on the table and it vanishes into Strawhacker’s hand. “These two people. You want to know if they’re alive or dead. One of them is, one of them isn’t. That’s all I know.”

“Some fortune.”

“You’re planning something. You are. You’re going to do something incredibly stupid, aren’t you?” She reaches out a hand for Patrick. “What is it you think is waiting for you out there? Beyond the fence? Tell me. Please.”

Her hand scrabbles closer and Patrick slams his fist down on it as if it were a spider.

Strawhacker cries out and the tavern goes silent and so many faces swing toward them and the bartender yells, “Hey!” Before anybody can ask a question, Patrick stands and snatches his poncho and shoves his way out the door and allows in the wind that extinguishes all the candles in one rushing breath.

The storm is stronger now. The rain lashes at him, pattering his poncho and needling his skin. He looks over his shoulder often, seeing if anyone follows, half expecting to see the long silhouette of the blind woman loping after him, the silken orbs of her eyes hatched, spiders spilling from the sockets.

He reaches for the book twice, reassured by the weight and pressure of it, as if it might have been snatched away after all. He has learned much from it. First that his father was experimenting with more than a neuroblocker for Volpexx. There are slips of paper printed from websites full of passages about neurodegenerative conditions associated with prions—everything from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease to fatal insomnia to lobos—and how they are spread: the consumption of meat, the administration of human growth hormone, and sexual intercourse. There is no cure for prion infection and the pathogen is difficult to destroy, resilient to heat and enzymes.

And there are pages crammed with his small, square handwriting about stock cultures and select agent organisms and the CDC and sodium hypochlorite and on and on, like a language Patrick didn’t speak.

And then there was the very last page, ripped almost entirely, only a frayed sleeve of it remaining, on which is written half his Gmail address. His father, he knew, was paranoid. He wouldn’t correspond with Patrick through his military account because he thought someone would read their emails. And he constantly changed the passwords on his credit cards, frequent-flier programs, and other accounts because he was certain someone would hack him.