Red Moon (51 page)

It is then that he unzips his backpack and withdraws the silver vial and sets it on the counter between them like a dare, like a bullet, as if this were some game of Russian roulette. Slowly she reaches out a hand to twist the vial until she can read the label. “That’s why you were here? In the Ghostlands?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you came for? A vaccine?” Her hand lingers on the vial—and she fights the competing desires to hurl it against the wall and swallow it whole.

“That’s what I thought I came for. I found something else.” His hand joins hers, and the vial vanishes from sight and she feels some fleeting relief. “You know what it’s like, having something inside you you can’t control.”

“On many levels, yes.”

“Here’s your chance to put a stop to it.”

She thinks for a long time, tugged one way and then the other, and then remembers some long-ago joke her father told her, about how even the best marriages are the result of overlooking the things you hate and focusing on the things you love. He said this just before dragging his wife, her mother, into an embrace and nuzzling her neck. It was and was not a joke. And when Claire looks inside herself now, past the fatigue, past the temptation and convenience of being fully human, she sees the two writhing forms at the heart of her, and she knows who she is and cannot betray that marriage.

She slides the vial toward Patrick. “I want you to take it.”

His hand pushes back, but she resists him and he does not battle her further. “There’s enough for us both.”

“I want
you
to take it.”

“Think how much easier things would be. Do you really want to side with these people?”

“I hardly recognize them. But I know who I am.”

He takes a long time to nod his agreement, but when he does, she helps him mix the powder with the diluents and reconstitute the vaccine and dose the syringe and find the vein. She swabs the blood that wells at his elbow. Then she kisses him again, this time finding his lips.

H
E IS A
small man. Maybe that is why no one seems to notice him. He wears safety goggles, a white jumpsuit with a General Mills logo along the breast, and a matching ball cap under which his fluorescent hair is nearly hidden. He holds a clipboard and pen and walks along a steel gangway with a chain railing. To either side of him, in this dry milling facility outside Des Moines, conveyors grumble and choppers mash and ovens process corn into flakes, flour, grits, meal, that will then be outsourced.

Yellow dust fills the air. Wide-blade fans, built into the walls, suck it outside. The roar of their blades and the crackle of the corn and the cranking of the machinery make it nearly impossible to hear. The noise doesn’t bother him. He feels perfectly at home here, as he should, since this is the twentieth facility—some dry millers, some wet millers—he has visited this month under the false pretense of quality control. Beside him, a seemingly endless stream of shelled corn sizzles down a chute.

His hand is missing two fingers, but he doesn’t have any trouble unzipping a custom-sewn compartment at his sleeve. From it falls a white, flaky dust. First one arm, and then the other. As if he is crumbling to ash or performing some funeral rite. He can fit a surprising amount into each sleeve, four liters’ worth of seed. That’s how he likes to think of it, as seed. The processed remains of the infected. Balor is dead, Magog is dead, but the mission is not: Puck set out weeks before with a pickup stocked full of ziplock containers they prepared for him.

He dusts off his hands once the last of the seed has fallen from him.

Prions, the widely read research of Neal Desai explains, are extremely resistant to standard inactivation methods, including boiling, irradiation, dry heat, and chemical treatment. At best, the prions reduce their infectivity but remain alive, waiting to swarm into a new system and take it over. It takes four and a half hours to kill the infection at 132 degrees Celsius—and even then it must be doused with hydrochloride and hypochlorite. Compared to that, the dry millers are the equivalent of a tanning bed. From here the infection will be processed into everything—toothpaste, yogurt, juice, cereal, chips, crackers, beer, beef, bread—truly everything.

When Puck makes his way out of the facility, the assistant manager, a man with a squat, square body, chases him down in the parking lot. The sky is a dying shade of purple. Puck keys open his pickup and pulls off his hat and tosses it inside the cab. The manager asks if everything looked okay.

“Everything was great,” Puck says and checks his hair in the side mirror. “Just lovely.”

“Will you be sending me a report?”

Puck climbs into the cab and keys the ignition and says over the engine, “You’ll be hearing from me.”

And he will. Everyone will. One night or another, likely when the moon is full, they will shut off their televisions or set down their forks or pause in their lovemaking, their heads cocked, before going to the window and staring through their warped reflections and wondering at the sirens that steadily fill the night with their howling.

Thanks to Katherine Fausset, Holly Frederick, and all the rest of the grand old crew at Curtis Brown, Ltd.

To Team Werewolf: Helen Atsma, Kirsten Reach, Oliver Johnson, and all the good and mighty at Hachette for their editorial and marketing muscle.

To Lyric Bartholomay, Cory O’Neel, Jason Ryan Arment, Julie Babbit, Chris Herring, Michael Kimber, Peter Percy, and Elizabeth Whitley for their help with the heavy research that went into this novel.

To Tyler Cabot, Rob Spillman, Kevin Larimer, Donovan Hohn, and Radhika Jones for their support. To Dean Bakopoulos for friendship. To Peter Straub and John Irving for wisdom and encouragement.

To my colleagues and students at St. Olaf College, Pacific University, and Iowa State University.

To the National Endowment for the Arts.

And a special thanks to my family, especially my wife, whose tolerance and enthusiasm and partnership mean everything. I’d lasso the moon for you, Chief.

BENJAMIN PERCY
was raised in the high desert of Central Oregon. He is the author of the novel
The Wilding
and two short-story collections,
Refresh, Refresh
and
The Language of Elk
. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Pushcart Prize, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and
The Paris Review
’s
George
Plimpton Prize for Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio and published by
Esquire
,
GQ
,
Men’s Journal
,
Outside
,
Time
, and the
Wall Street Journal
. He is the writer-in-residence at St. Olaf College in Northfield,
Minnesota
.

The Wilding

Refresh, Refresh

The Language of Elk

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Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Part II
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Part III
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Benjamin Percy
Newsletters
Copyright