Red Moon (45 page)

How safe and beautiful everything must look from way up there, Claire thinks, even if it’s not.

“You are not a wolf,” the woman says again. “You are not a wolf, no?”

Beyond the farmhouse, behind the barn, next to a grain bin, on a spread of pasture, there is a chapel of bones. The walls are made of skulls stacked one on top of the other, mortared together with cement, some of their jaws propped open in mute snarls. Femurs have been fitted into benches, heavily lacquered to a slick yellow color. Eyeteeth and molars and finger bones braid the pillars and crossbeams. In the corners stand candelabras made from tibias and fibulas. There is a pulpit made entirely of vertebrae, fitted together like some morbid puzzle. On it sits a communion basket built from a rib cage.

Claire has been told to wait here. Not asked. Told.

She tried to tell them she must be going. She tried to move toward her bike and pedal off before they could stop her. But their smiles dropped from their faces and their hands gripped their revolvers and they said no. She could not. She had to speak to Tío.

They have her backpack, all her weapons except a knife tucked into her boot. She should have left the girl on top of the crypt. She should have known better than to do good, to believe that any sort of moral code applied to a world turned upside down. Now she waits in a cage of bones and tries not to imagine herself ripped apart and cleaned and made into a chair.

She hears Tío long before she sees him.

At first she believes the noise belongs to another fighter jet, a sharp tearing, like a blade slicing the fabric of the sky. Then it grows closer and she can distinguish it as belonging to the earth—stones biting, soil grating—what turns out to be a dragged pitchfork, the tines scraping the ground. He appears in the doorway, blotting out the rectangle of sunlight. His head is shaved, his brow a swollen shelf beneath which two black eyes regard her. He steps inside and the pitchfork emits a sound that makes her skin tighten all over.

She stands in the middle of the aisle. He walks the perimeter of the chapel, circling the pews that surround her. He wears boots, jeans, but is shirtless and sweating, with pieces of hay stuck to his skin. He is thick, not muscled. Hairless except for a stripe running up his belly. A tattoo of a splintery cross reaches across his back. The tissue along his shoulder is raised, a lighter color, a scar in the shape of a mouth. She searches for more injuries and finds them: claw marks ribbing his belly. She can barely hear his voice over the pitchfork’s screech when he says, “I am grateful to you.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“You’re not dead. Yet.” The grating continues until he reaches the pulpit and pauses there to lean against the pitchfork. “For that you should be grateful too.”

“Why would you kill me?”

“Because you’re one of them.”

She nods at the scar gumming his shoulder. “So are you.”

He fingers the scar as if he wishes he could peel it away. “Not long and not by choice. I’m just sick. That’s what I am.”

“Plenty of us who don’t believe in what Balor believes. Even here in the Ghostlands. Not everybody lets the dog off the leash.”

“Then why not leave?”

“Same reason as you. I’m trapped in this pen.”

He starts toward her, not in any sort of hurry. There is enough room in the aisle for him to circle her, and the tines sketch a shape like a noose around her. She can smell him, the musk of his sweat. She imagines him swinging the pitchfork, skewering her. She has wished for death, but she always imagined it coming swiftly, her neck wrenched by a rope, her body vaporized by a missile. She won’t die here—not like this.

“I’m going to kill Balor,” she says, almost at a yell. Saying it aloud makes it feel real for the first time and not an idle fantasy.

Tío is behind her now. She can feel his breath gusting from his mouth, across her neck, when he leans toward her. “Do you know where he is?”

“Not exactly.”

“I know where he is.”

“Then you’ll help me.”

Again he circles her, his eyes crawling across her body, and then bullies up against her. His belly sticks to her arm. He pinches a lock of hair between his fingers and sniffs it. He whispers in her ear, “Who are you, telling me my business?”

“I’m the one who saved your niece, asshole.”

She hears the damp crackle of his mouth opening and then the click of his teeth closing around her hair. He sucks on it a moment, tasting her, before stepping back, lifting the pitchfork, and stabbing it into the dirt floor. It shivers between them.

“Do you know what I noticed the other day?” he says. “That I do not pay attention to the things I used to pay attention to. When I used to walk down a street, you know what I would see? I would see houses or cars. I would think,
man
, look at that place. With that wraparound porch and that leaded glass and all those gables and shit. I would love to live there. I would think, look at that sweet ride, look at those rims, listen to those six cylinders thundering. I want one of those.” He reaches a finger into his belly button as if feeding it. “You know what I look for now? Movement. My eyes are always hunting for movement. For animal life. All those things I used to care about no longer matter. What matters is hunger. Appetite. In this way I have become what I behold. Don’t call me human. Call me animal. I no longer live in a world where people sit around the television like some cold fire that conjures images of what I supposedly need. What I need is food. What I need are claws to tear my food and teeth to gnash it.”

She is convinced that this is her only chance, that she has only moments before he tires of her audience. “I’m going to kill him. Are you going to help me or not?”

“This is what you think when you are an animal. You think, am I predator or am I prey? Am I climbing into a mouth or am I widening my jaws?”

“Your niece—”

He yanks the pitchfork from the ground and holds it before his face and stares at her through its silvery tines. “I am widening my jaws.”

M
IRIAM KNOWS
she is in a basement, but she does not know where. The room is twelve paces by twelve paces. The walls are concrete. When it rains, water dribbles from a crack in the corner. The floor is slick there from mildew. Light leaks from a shallow window made from glass blocks.

There was a short-lived time when they merely kept her locked in the room. She picked at the glass-block window until one fingernail broke and another peeled back. Then she swept off the mattress and wrenched up the frame and slammed one of its posts four times against the window, chipping it, cracking it, but by then two lycans rushed in and wrestled her down and taught her a lesson. That’s what they call it: teaching her a lesson.

She never seems to learn. She bit the eyeball of one guard, blinded him. She crushed the windpipe of another with her elbow. That was when they began handcuffing her to the bed. First her hands. Then, when she scissored her legs and broke someone’s nose, her ankles too.

She bucked her body and rattled the bed frame and strained against the cuffs until they cut her skin. And the men would come in, one after the other, and teach her a lesson. Months pass in this way. She is a hole. She is a hole into which a knife fits.

Now her body feels as if it is collapsing inward. She stops spitting and yelling at them. Her eyes are dry but her bedsores weep. They feed her through a straw or with a spoon and she pisses and shits into a pan. She lies as still as a corpse. Her stare goes unfocused and settles on some middle distance beyond the drop ceiling. Every now and then she will hear the shrill voice of a mouse or the shuddering of a pipe or the groan of a footstep overhead. Otherwise, there is nothing to occupy her but the possibility of what exists high above and beyond the gray faces of these walls with mold vining across them—and how she might escape, how her life depends on fleeing this room, her future so much easier to study than a past in which crouch the shadows of her child and husband.

She hears someone enter the room but does not turn her head. She can smell him—the cologne applied thickly as if to hide some stink. And she can hear him—the openmouthed smack of bubblegum. Puck leans over her. She keeps her gaze unfocused even when he leans in and sniffs her.

He picks up her hand, lets it fall. The hand he sliced the fingers from. To make them even. This was more than a month ago, when he plugged an iron into the wall. Then pulled out a pair of garden shears. He opened and closed them, opened and closed them, making a rusty song. He was watching the iron. When it began to hiss and burble with steam, when the orange light on its handle blinked off and indicated it was ready, he took her hand and snipped off one finger, then the other, right at the knuckle. The blood sizzled and the flesh cooked when he pressed the iron to the stumps, cauterizing them. The wound has healed but remains an angry red.

He picks up the hand again and takes the thumb in his mouth. He sucks on it, then bites down. She does not react, though she wants to scream, to pull away from him. With blood on his lips, he says, “Just a taste of what’s to come.”

She is of no use to the Resistance. She has done nothing to terribly wrong them. Her capture and punishment have everything to do with this one man. This little man made big by his wretched desire. He tells her she is filthy. She is disgusting. She is so vile that he cannot maintain an erection. He tells her she is the reason—she and her wretched niece—they are the reason he is pocked with scars. Scissors, bullets, knives. All instruments of torture he will look forward to introducing her to. His voice softens when he says, “Don’t think I’m going to kill you. That would be too kind. You’re going to be around for a long time, my pet.”

His face hangs over her for a long time, studying her, waiting for some response.

“I know you can hear me,” he says.

A part of her can’t, the part of her that no longer feels alive, and a part of her can, the part of her that remains coiled and ready to spring once given the chance.

Chase feels extraordinary. He feels better than he has in years. For too long he has felt outside himself, as if he were watching a show on the television across the room, only distantly aware that he was the lead actor fumbling through his lines. Now he is so
conscious
, hyperattuned to the mottled texture of the wall, the pebble stuck to the tread of his shoe, the rank cloud of perfume trailing a woman down the hall. His belly has shrunk and tightened. The veins are beginning to rise out of his skin again. He grows a beard, despite Buffalo demanding he shave, telling him that the public believes a man with a beard is a man with something to hide. Instead of slumping often into a chair, he paces or runs in place or shadowboxes or pounds out push-ups. He cannot sit still.

The other day, in the West Wing, he met with the secretary of agriculture about food security. He had that dreamy glow about him that comes from two beers on an empty stomach, and he crossed his feet on the desk while she sat across from him smelling like honey and wearing a powder-blue power suit with a black lace bra blooming from her blouse. “The conversation so far has been about oil and uranium. Food and water need to be on the agenda. We’ve lost thousands of hectares of farmland in Oregon and Washington.”

He held a pen in his hand—a big-barreled fountain pen—and he spun it and rolled it between his fingers. He knew she thought he was an idiot. Somehow she looked down her nose at him even when seated. And she explained policies and probabilities with the voice of a kindergarten teacher speaking to a special student, telling him China had 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of the arable land, their population outpacing their ability to be self-sustainable with grain production. The Chinese have bailed out Bank of America and Northwestern Mutual. Now they are ramping up their efforts at offshore land acquisition. They have purchased thousands of hectares in Africa and now want to do the same in the U.S. “Don’t allow it,” she said. “Enforce restrictions.” And, on top of that, he needed to put forth a conservation act that would stop suburban sprawl and preserve that land. With fuel costs out of control, locally grown food was no longer a luxury; it was a necessity.

He nodded and smiled and somehow carried on a reasonable conversation with her even though he was about to propose to Congress a revision of the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2007 that would lessen oversight on mergers, acquisitions, and takeovers in its specific support of offshore land acquisition by foreign agricultural companies and even though he could only think about what her pearl earring would taste like if he took her ear into his mouth.

The pen spun over and under his fingers—from his thumb to his pinky and back again—and he said, “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

They needed the bailout—he didn’t know what else to do—with an acre of Iowa farmland up to twenty thousand dollars—and he needed to get laid—he could not think about anything else—even days later, during an autoworkers and union leaders rally in Dearborn, Michigan, when he tells the crowd about his 447-billion-dollar jobs package, about fast-tracking economy-boosting initiatives, rolling out infrastructure projects and cutting payroll taxes and social security taxes, taxing capital gains, limiting deductions for the wealthy, and while he speaks, he can only concentrate on the redheaded woman in the front row wearing the Harley-Davidson tank top, so that afterward, when she emerges from the crush of photographers and hand shakers, he allows her to get closer than the Secret Service agents permit, her hand around his neck, her mouth at his ear.

Buffalo has followed him to Michigan. They have three more stops over the next two days in Flint and Ann Arbor and Kalamazoo. In the limo, after the rally, Buffalo clicks on an overhead light and snaps open a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
and from behind it asks, “What did that woman say to you?”

Chase unstrangles his tie and unbuttons his long-sleeve and tosses them aside. He wears an old white T-shirt with deodorant-stained pits and a hole torn in the belly. Once he arrived in D.C., his wardrobe was no longer his own, his closet and bureau stuffed with pinned shirts and neatly folded triangles of underwear. He hasn’t worn his old clothes for a long time, until now, and the smell of the shirt, of mildewy sweat, reminds him of the breath of some deep, dark place. He likes it.

“She said I was a fool. She said I was a wayward knight. She said I was Don Quixote. She said all it took was somebody to appeal to my elevated sense of worth and importance and I would do whatever they told me to do even if that meant spearing windmills and calling them dragons. That was what she said.”

The pages of the newspaper wither into a crumpled mess. “You just stood there? That whole time? And let her say that to you?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, it was sort of an interesting insult, so I thought I’d stick around to see how it ended.”

“How did it end?”

The rally took place at the Ford Motor Company headquarters and the limo and the police escort leave its gates now and pass through the throng of protesters outside. Their screams can be heard through the windows and over the hiss of the air-
conditioning
. They make their hands into fists and their mouths into toothy ovals. Their signs read
IMPEACH WILLIAMS
and
THE DEATH OF AMERICA
. A noosed doll in a blue suit dangles from a streetlamp.

Chase feels that old familiar anger uncoiling inside him. He wants to kick open the door, break their signs over his knee, piss in their mouths. Instead, he puts his hand on the door as if it needs holding shut and snaps off a line at Buffalo: “She said I could be my own man if only I cut loose that fat leech attached to my ass.”

Now they are past the protesters and cruising the empty, pitted streets of Dearborn, the sky as gray as the concrete stacked all around him. When Chase looks from the window to Buffalo, he sees that his adviser’s eyes have narrowed into slits, his mouth into a white puckered ring. “I see.”

Chase’s anger fades all at once, as if he were a house whose pipes have emptied of hot water. The sight of Buffalo shrinking away from him is too much. His old friend. Maybe his only friend, who is only trying to help.

This past week, it has been difficult to keep calm, to control his pulse, his adrenaline. He nearly crushed a ringing phone with his fist. He nearly knocked over his chair and ripped off his clothes and leapt out a window during a briefing. He nearly pressed one of the interns up against the wall when he saw the way she fit into her skirt. He looks now from the stop sign on the corner to the smudge on his shoe to a fly battering the window to the brown sphere of Buffalo’s eye. He is studying Chase.

Ever since he flushed the Volpexx, Chase has worried his secret would glow red hot and come sizzling out of his chest and reveal his risk, what would amount to betrayal, the possibility that he might come unleashed at any moment and alert the world to his condition. “Sorry,” he says.

At the center of the fountain is an elevated platform on top of which stand stone figures holding hands. Their faces are morose but resilient, chins raised, mouths pinched. Normally their empty eyes would gush tears and splash full the pool below them. But the memorial went dry a long time ago. This is Pioneer Courthouse Square, where the Christmas tree once burned like a torch and dozens lost their lives and where a few hundred lycans now gather.

Magog shakes bags of charcoal into the fountain until it is heaped full. Then he empties three bottles of lighter fluid and sparks a match. A circle of flame rises with the sound of a hundred fists striking a pillow. The high flames lick and blacken the legs of the stone figures before retreating to an orange glow among the whitening coals. Magog uses a shovel to stir them. Then he arranges several grates, upon which he lays venison and mutton and beef, steaks and chops, seasoned with a dry rub he scoops from a metal bowl and applies liberally. Meat sizzles. Smoke spices the air.

The courthouse square is edged by a long line of folding tables. Here are stacks of plates, cups of silverware, bowls of chips and pretzels and candy. Soda. Beer. Apples. Muskmelons. Some of the lycans sit on benches or along the tiered steps. Others huddle in groups. Mostly men dressed in T-shirts, denim, their hair and beards long, their skin as tough and hard as roots. They wear backpacks slung over their shoulders. Their teeth gnash down on chips and snap into apples. Their throats surge when they guzzle Coors and Cokes. Maybe it is the hour of the day—with the sun directly overhead—or maybe it is the bodies all pressed together or the coals brightly burning in the fountain, but the square seems to grow warmer by the second. Their clothes darken with sweat. They drink and then they drink some more. Their conversations grow louder, tangled up with laughter. It has been a long time since they felt normal, since they stood in the open air without worrying about a plane rushing overhead or an arrow whistling from an open window.

All around them stretches downtown Portland, the streets like silent, empty canyons walled in by skyscrapers. The windowsills are mudded with swallow nests and the sidewalks spotted with bird shit. Pollen streaks windows. When the wind blows, dirt flies from sills and awnings like brown banners.

In the square, a drink is spilled, words exchanged. Two men circle each other with their arms out and their backs hunched. Their beards are as black as oil. They tremor into a state of transformation. They leap, drag each other to the ground. Fists thud. Teeth bite. Claws slash. No one makes a move to interfere. It ends soon after it begins, with the winner clamping his mouth around the neck of the other and chewing his way through it, the dying body quaking beneath him as if in a state of frantic sex. The quarrel is over. Laughter and conversation resume. The body remains among them, bleeding out on the bricks.

Balor knows that the Ghostlands are pocketed with good people, with farms and communes run by those who do not want any part of what he has built. And he knows they are not here today. He is surrounded by criminals, animals. Here for food and here for trouble. Which is why he feels no remorse for what will become of them. Soon.