Red Moon (5 page)

But that isn’t who knocks his hat off in the hallway. A hand cuffs the back of his head and he watches his hat flip forward, the brim of it clattering to the tile, spinning to a rest. Slowly Patrick blows out a sigh and turns around.

“Hey there, Miracle Boy.” He wears cowboy boots and tight jeans with a rodeo buckle shining from the belt. He’s big, nearly a head taller than Patrick, squarely built and jowly like a bulldog. “We haven’t met.”

Patrick shrugs off his backpack and it thuds to the floor next to his hat.

“All day long, I’m hearing about you. People talking about Miracle Boy this, Miracle Boy that.” He smiles without humor. “You’re famous. I never met anybody who’s famous before. You going to sign me an autograph?”

In the crowd eddying past them, people are beginning to slow and stare and whisper. Something is about to happen, they know, and whatever happens, Patrick knows, might determine how he fits into this place. “Fuck yourself,” he says, his voice more like a shrug than a threat.

“That’s no way to treat a fan.” He mocks sadness, pooching out his lower lip. Then, in a flash, his body surges forward, his huge hand slapping the side of Patrick’s head, knocking him off-balance, mussing his hair. “Miracle Boy, I’m wanting to ask you a question.” He goes to slap Patrick again, this time with the opposite arm, but Patrick dances back from the swing and feels only the breeze it displaces. “Shouldn’t you be dead? Why didn’t you die along with everybody else?” His eyebrows rise into the shapes of crowbars. He circles Patrick and Patrick pivots to follow him. “Not a scratch on you, Miracle Boy. Hardly seems fair.”

His arm shoots out again, cuffs Patrick on the side of the head, an openhanded hammerblow that makes his ear momentarily deaf, so what the boy says sounds a long way off. “Does that make you lucky or a hero or a ghost?”

People gather around them like a lasso. Some of the faces are smiling. Patrick looks to them for help, and when it doesn’t come, they blur away. His mind hums like a wasp’s wings. He breathes in a gulping way, as if he is choking. He has thought endlessly about what he could have done on the plane, how he might have pulled off his belt and used it to strangle the lycan, ripped the fire extinguisher from the rear cabin and bashed in its skull. Now, with his body trembling all over, it’s as if all those thoughts finally find an outlet. He feels a darkness rising through him, drowning him, a wonderful, horrible feeling.

Patrick doesn’t aim. He doesn’t arrange his legs in a boxer’s stance. He simply whips his fist into the boy’s face and sends him reeling back, blood geysering from his nose and mouth. The pain catches up a moment later, a sharp volt that sizzles from his knuckles to his wrist. He shakes it off and then stares at his hand, the skin torn and raw, like a tool he doesn’t recognize.

The boy hunches over and twitches, an apron of blood running down his face and chest. He keeps touching his nose and seems baffled by the red smeared across the tips of his fingers. Somebody laughs, a
haw-haw-haw
that sounds a little like a crow’s cackle. At that the boy gathers himself upright and rushes Patrick with his arms out.

At the last moment Patrick leaps aside with his leg angled out to trip. He has never moved like this in his life. The boy falls heavily, his body impacting the tile with a
thud
, his face with a
thwap
. He rolls over, screaming a scream that is muffled by the hands he tents over his mouth. His eyes well with tears and stare up at Patrick with a furious sadness, like he can’t figure out how this has been done to him but he will find a way to rectify it.

Principal Wetmore has a stiff broom of a mustache. He wears a baggy tan suit and a Bugs Bunny tie. His office is eerily dark, lit only by a tall lamp with a heavy shade that tints the room mustard. His bald head flashes with the light and so do his squarish glasses when he leans forward and lays his elbows on his desk. “One day in and we’re already talking, huh?”

“Afraid so,” Patrick says. He opens and closes his right hand, the knuckles chewed up and throbbing with what feels like an electrical current.

The walls are busy with bookcases and diplomas and a family photo taken in a JCPenney studio where the principal smiles proudly over the shoulder of his permed wife and their twin boys. On his desk sits a half-eaten bowl of peanuts with a halo of salt around it. Next to it is a nameplate that reads
THE BIG CHEESE
in inlaid gold lettering. The door is closed. But windows surround them, one of them looking out into the hallway, the glass-paneled trophy case. Students drift past and goggle their eyes at Patrick. He tries to imagine he is looking through a portal at the bottom of the sea and the students are strange fish with needly teeth and translucent skin.

“He started it, right?” Wetmore says. “Seth?”

At first Patrick isn’t sure whether he is being sarcastic or not, so he doesn’t respond except with a searching look.

“Obviously he started it. And I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry that’s how you’ll remember your first day here.”

“Thanks.”

“To be honest, to be perfectly frank, I’m glad you did what you did. Don’t repeat that! But it’s better that you laid him out rather than the other way around. But that’s between you and me, mano a mano. You got me, amigo?”

Patrick nods and looks to the door, wishing himself on the other side of it.

“Now hopefully people will leave you alone. But I can’t have fighting!” He raises his finger in the air and wags it. “I just can’t.”

Patrick bounces his knee, chews at the dry skin of his lower lip.

“Next time, do me a favor? Walk away?”

Patrick glances out the window. Through the crowd of students milling by, he spots two of the skinheads. They lean against the trophy case, as still as the golden runners behind them, with their arms crossed and their eyes on him. He nods at them. They give him nothing in return.

“Patrick?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try.”

“Look.” Wetmore steeples his hands. “You’ve been through a lot. Publicly. I thought about inviting you in here—did you know that? were your ears warm?—I actually thought about inviting you into my office a few weeks ago when I heard you’d enrolled. Just to say hello. I honestly wanted to tell you that I honestly didn’t know how the students were going to treat you. Whether they would resent you for what you’ve been through or love you for it. Maybe a little of both. I just didn’t know. I
do
know that it’s always hard coming to a new place. Maybe not for you, but maybe so, probably so. And if so, we want you to let us know what we can do. Okay? Okay.”

They stand and Patrick glances again to the window. The skinheads are gone. When he looks back, Wetmore has his hand extended for a shake. Patrick says, “Sorry,” and raises his own, bloodied and trembling, in an apologetic wave.

C
LAIRE DOESN’T LIKE
wide-open space. It makes her feel exposed and untethered, as if she might float off with a gust of wind. From where she stands—in the weed-choked parking lot of a Shell station in Frazee, Minnesota—she can see three different weather systems at the same time: a mushrooming collection of thunderheads that appear bruised and intermittently veined with light; an enormous cloud that reminds her of a gray jellyfish trailing its poisoned tentacles; and an anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud that sponges up the light of the sun. She knows its name, cumulonimbus, because her father taught her all of them, along with the different types of trees, knots, birdcalls, constellations.

She can remember lying on the driveway with her father, every light in the house extinguished, the stars sprinkled across the black reaches of the sky—this is how they spent so many summer evenings. And as the constellations wheeled past, he would test her, her eyes tracking his finger when he pointed there, and there, and there. The stars would web together into designs that seemed to glow brighter. “Carnia,” she would say, spotting the keel of a ship floating in a midnight sea. “Leo. Gemini. Hydras.”

Now she imagines her father’s upraised hand becoming translucent, the stars glowing through it, and then vanishing altogether. She pushes the thought from her head and tries to concentrate on something small and good. The endless night taught her that. If she doesn’t focus on something else, she doesn’t move, and if she doesn’t move, they will find her. She doesn’t understand why, but they want her. The men chasing up the staircase—and, waiting for her on the sidewalk, the Tall Man in the black coat. Above her—for the moment anyway; she knows better than to count on anything anymore—is a broad patch of blue sky. That is something to be grateful for.

The wind hasn’t stopped blowing since the Twin Cities, like a draft from an open door. It rises now and kicks up a tiny whirlwind of trash and grit that dies a moment later. She sinks into her Carhartt jacket—given to her by a trucker—two sizes too big and the color of the hard-packed soil and browned grass that stretches to the horizon. In one pocket rest a Snickers bar and a half-eaten bag of Cheetos, and in the other, a wad of cash and the letter from her father. She wears sneakers and jeans and a long-sleeve, blood-spotted shirt. Otherwise she has nothing—hardly even a memory of last night, so much of it a blur.

She remembers transforming, the fury and adrenaline turning over inside her like a big black dog. She remembers crashing through the glass and tumbling through the night and staggering off into the woods. She remembers the Tall Man.

In the distance, dogs bayed. Flashlights cut through the falling snow. She hoped that the wind would blow away her scent, that the snow would fill up her tracks. Her friend Stacey lived only a mile away, and Claire raced there with the intent of pounding at her window, begging for help. In her panic she almost did exactly that, stopping short, sliding in the snow and bracing herself against a tree, when she noticed, at the last minute, the black cars parked in the driveway. Every window blazed with light interrupted by moving shadows. They had come for her family too. She watched them escort Stacey and her mother out the front door and lock them in the back of a car. She watched them drag the father’s body down the steps and roll it into an open trunk. And then she watched the house grow bright with fire that reached through the windows and made the snow steam.

She had run then. Run without thinking—through the night, the skeins of snow—gnashing her teeth and trying to ignore the pain in her wrist and her heart. It wasn’t her plan to jump the train—she had no plan except the single-minded impulse to escape—until she heard the banshee cry of its whistle.

Tracks cleaved through the center of town, and she could see the freight cars snaking darkly through the trees. The ground tremored—even the air seemed to shake—when she burst from the woods and scampered slantingly up the gravel berm. The train was long and she could not see the engine, but she heard the faraway blast of its whistle and guessed it was nearly within city limits. The cars slowed. The wind tried to push her back. The wheels kicked up ice. The clattering roar took over every other sound in the world. She raced perilously close, reaching out with her good hand—its knuckles furred over, its fingers curled into pointed tips—and snatched hold of a short steel ladder. Her feet dragged behind her, skidding across the snow and gravel, until she hooked her other arm onto the ladder, bracing her elbow against a rung. She used her last bit of energy to haul herself up and crawl to the rear platform of a freight car, where she curled up on herself, trying to create a pocket of warmth, and only then, when she retreated into her human form, did she cry.

Deep in the night, the train lumbered into Minneapolis and came to a screeching stop at a grain elevator. She rose wearily from the freight car and wandered away in a daze, her ears aching, her body humming. She was in an industrial area. Factories. Storage centers. Big metal warehouses stained with murals of rust. Machinery hummed. Steam rose in arching columns like bridges to the moon. There was no snow here, or if there was, it had melted, but it was cold all the same and she crossed her arms against the wind and the pain nested in her wrist. She found a road with no sidewalk and walked along its grassy shoulder. She had no plan. She just wanted to feel as though she was moving, putting distance between her and whoever she felt still pursued her.

A parade of semitrailers motored by and she could feel the drivers’ eyes on her. Twenty yards ahead, one of the trucks pulled over with a chirp of air brakes and clicked on its hazards. The passenger door kicked open, and when she walked by it, a man was leaning out, a thin-faced man with a gray goatee, asking if she needed a ride.

“No,” she said automatically. She looked down the road as though her ride might come around the bend any minute now, then back at him. The cab of the truck, high above her, was brightly lit and seemed as big as a house. She imagined it was warm too. “I don’t know.”

He regarded her and chewed at his lower lip. “Look. I got a daughter about your age, and if I saw her walking around a place like this, middle of the night and all, I’d want her to get home.”

When he said that, she felt at once horribly depressed and comforted. She wanted to tell him everything, to let it out in a sobbing gush. Instead she said, in a small voice that barely carried over the noise of the engine, “I can’t go home.”

He dropped his head in consideration and then looked at her sadly from under his eyebrows. “Then I’d want her to get herself someplace safe.” He laid his hand on the door handle and pulled it inward an inch. “Your decision.”

She knew she could overpower him if she had to—assuming he didn’t have a gun—though she couldn’t imagine her body suffering through another transformation. She decided to trust him. She needed to trust somebody right now. She took a deep, steadying breath and climbed into the cab.

It smelled like chewing tobacco and stale French fries. He gave her a long look that at first disturbed her, until he said, “You okay?” He tapped at his own forehead while looking at hers. She pulled down the visor and flipped open the mirror and gasped at her reflection. Her face was purpled, bruised from the transformation—she expected that—but not the blood, the smattering of scabs along her cheeks, the raised wormlike gash on her forehead.

“I fell,” she said and spit on her thumb to wipe away what she could.

He put the truck into gear and the truck groaned forward. The CB radio was busy with jabbering conversation, and he clicked it off, its noise replaced by a country song playing quietly from the radio. He cranked up the heat and said, “Here,” tossing his jacket onto her lap.

When he asked where she was headed, she said she didn’t know. He shook his head but didn’t say anything more as they drove on—along a series of narrow roads, through a maze of warehouses, under a graffiti-painted bridge, finally pulling onto a ramp and grinding up to speed as they filed onto the interstate, surprisingly busy for the hour. The dashboard clock read 3:03. Her wrist throbbed. She felt weighed down with exhaustion. She felt safe in the truck, surrounded by so much steel. She liked being up so high. From here, if she squinted her eyes, the lights of the city glowed like stars, the strip malls and neighborhoods like distant galaxies, and soon her eyes shuttered closed completely and she fell asleep.

He made stops all through the early morning, at grocery stores and drugstores and gas stations, leaving her in the cab with the engine idling, hauling up the rear door, yanking out the gangplank, dollying crates of milk. She examined her wrist at one point—swollen an angry red and run through with a blackened stripe—and then she blearily peered out the window and fell back into her empty dreams. Eventually the sun rose and reddened the sky and they parked behind a Mega supermarket, and when the man climbed out and slammed the door, she woke with a start and remembered the envelope.

It was wrinkled and warm from its time in her pocket. She ripped it open and found money. Two hundred dollars in twenties. And a letter. If you could call it that. A lined piece of paper dotted with pencil marks, hundreds of them, in a seemingly random design. Her father loved puzzles and games and she knew immediately this was one of them. Not out of playfulness, but because he believed someone else might come upon the note. The men in the black cars. Her skin tightened and her hair pricked. She could feel them out there—hunting her. She wondered for how long.

She studied the paper and moved her lips as though trying to sound something out. But her mind was too gummed up with panic and exhaustion, and in the few minutes before the man returned she couldn’t make sense of its cipher.

His name was Elwood, he finally told her. “Tenaya,” she said, and they shook hands, which felt so silly after the hours they had already shared. She didn’t know why she lied about her name—but the lie felt right and she had once read a book by a woman named Tenaya and liked it.

They stopped at a McDonald’s and he bought two breakfast meals, and she chewed through her egg sandwich and hash browns so quickly that he offered her his as well. She thought that sadness was supposed to ruin an appetite, but she felt terribly hungry and wanted only to stuff herself as if to fill some gulf inside her. She tried to save her crying for when she was alone in the cab, but sometimes she couldn’t hold the tears in, so she turned her face to the window. He never said anything, but at one point she noticed on the console next to her a box of tissues where none had been before.

By noon she had cried herself dry and her thoughts sharpened into questions. Why her parents? And Stacey’s family? And however many other lycans? They had done nothing. They had no connection to the plane attacks. They belonged to a co-op. They drove a Prius, for God’s sake. They were talkers. They hated the government—they hated the U.S. occupation of the Republic—but they had never taken any action outside of circulating petitions, holding protest signs on downtown corners. And then she remembered her father’s words: “There are things you don’t know.”

Maybe the answer was in the letter.

When they parked at the travel plaza in Frazee, Minnesota, Elwood left his hand on the gearshift and said, “End of the road.” He lifted his eyebrows expectantly. “Unless you want to head back to Twin Cities?”

She did not.

“Didn’t think so.”

She had been using his jacket as a blanket, and when she tried to hand it back, he shook his head, told her to keep it. “Somebody looking for you?” he asked, and when she did not respond he blew out a sigh and said, “You be careful. And you stay off the interstate if you don’t want to get found.”

It isn’t until he drives away—the gray exhaust rising from the truck’s bullhorn pipes—that she realizes she forgot to thank him. She lifts a hand as the truck departs, growing smaller in the distance, and she hopes he sees the gesture in his mirror. Then she turns around in a circle and feels lost and utterly alone, realizing she has no one to trust, nowhere to go.

The gas station is part of a larger travel plaza. There is a Subway attached to it and a video-game parlor she can see flashing through the windows. The parking lot is busy with cars and trucks, people pumping gas, cracking open sodas, sipping from steaming mugs of coffee. An SUV beeps its horn and the driver irritably lifts his hand off the wheel and she realizes she is in the way, standing in the middle of the lot, in the middle of all this traffic.

She starts toward the store, her wrist pulsing with every step, and when she pushes through the door, a bell chimes. One thing at a time, her mother always said. She tries to wrap her head around a plan. She needs a bathroom, a map, some ibuprofen and food. She can manage that at least. The rest can wait.

Behind the register stands a heavy woman with black roots showing through her bleached-blond hair. She stares a beat too long and Claire feels a surge of panic, wondering if her face has appeared on television, if the woman recognizes her. It seems impossible, but so does everything that has happened to her.

Once in the bathroom, she feels encouraged by her reflection in the mirror. She looks like hell. Her hair—which has always been a problem, a wavy blond tangle she conditions and straightens every morning—is snarled up in every direction. Her face looks like a piece of old, darkened fruit. And then there is the gash across her forehead, a second mouth. Who wouldn’t stare?

The daisy-patterned linoleum, peeling up at the corners, is littered with cigarette butts and toilet paper confetti. It is a four-stall bathroom, and as women walk in and out, their voices chattering, their eyes lingering on her, she tries to pay them no mind, draping her jacket over the paper-towel dispenser, tearing off a long sheet, dampening it, frothing it up with soap. She cleans up as best she can.

The travel mart has bins of five-dollar DVDs, open-air coolers full of cheese and sausage, racks of T-shirts with eagles and wolves silk-screened across them, display cases full of lacquered log clocks, and several grocery aisles crowded mostly with chips, pretzels, cookies, and candy. She selects an off-brand backpack from a rack, unzips its mouth, braces its strap in the crook of her elbow, and begins to stock up. A Rand McNally road atlas, ibuprofen, tampons, a blister pack of pens, a notebook with a cartoon football on its cover, two wolf T-shirts, duct tape, a bag of jerky, a box of granola bars, a bottle of Coke. And a newspaper, its headlines concerning the terrorist attacks.