Moonbane

by Al Sarrantonio

  “How can we get down without them seeing us?” Wyatt asked.

  “We’re going to run like hell,” Cowboy replied humorlessly.

  “How—” Wyatt began, but Cowboy cut him off by standing up.

  “If we wait any longer,” he said, staring into the rising Moon, “they’re going to charge and we’ll get lost in the middle of it. If we do that we’ll have both the wolves and Kramer trying to kill us.” He looked hard at Wyatt. “Sorry, but you stay between us, Wyatt. No heroics. They need you more in there than the rest of us put together.”

  Wyatt began to protest.

  “Just do it,” Pettis growled.

  Wyatt hesitated, then said, “All right.”

  “Let’s go.”

  We started at a soft trot, pounding down the soft slope in front of us, and worked up to a full-blown run as we hit the valley floor. There was something exhilarating and primal about it: an all-out race in the night with the cool desert air blowing across the face; adrenaline, despite a whole day of our walking in the heat, pumping through the entire system. This is the way racehorses must feel, or lions in full hunt, as the entire force of creation shoots through the body in this, the most vital moment of existence. This is what men in battle must feel when there is no choice and no turning back.

  I found myself screaming, amid the horrid howls of the wolves, screaming not in fright but in self-declaration—“I am me! I am alive!”—and I turned my head to see my companions running as fast and as recklessly beside me, their open mouths betraying their own abandon. Man, too, is an animal; perhaps at that moment we were closer to our enemy than at any other.

  We broke through the line of wolves at a dead run as they concentrated on the Moon and the hated base before them. Kicking pyramids of bones aside as we ran, we were twenty yards past them before there was any reaction.

  Ahead of us, a mere hundred and fifty yards away, I heard faint cries that I assumed were for our benefit.

  They were not.

  Behind us, the wolves had charged.

  From a vehicle, I had seen the hypnotizing grace of the wolf in flight, but from the ground, it was terrifying in a new way. I felt what the zebra or gazelle must feel when chased by the lion. I have already mentioned the lion. It is a most terrible machine to watch. Seemingly lazy, sleeping twenty hours of the day, it is, when hunting or angered, God’s most fearful creature. It did not garner its title as King of the Beasts through whimsy. Its body in flight is a smooth, sleek piston flow of muscle crowned with the cool eyes and visage of an emotionless killer.

  Subtract from the lion his sloth, his easily satisfied gluttony, his flaccid temper unless aroused, and you understand the werewolf completely.

  “Run, damnit, run!” Cowboy shouted. He fired his Uzi wildly into the air and then behind. We fought to keep Wyatt between us. The fence grew closer, and we began to angle over toward the front gate.

  “Run! Run!”

  A hundred yards to go.

  The front line of wolves, burning eyes like lamps from hell, tongues hanging from the sides of open mouths that glowed with long white teeth, closed to within ten yards of us. Pettis whirled, spraying bullets into the nearest, holding their progress up as those around the wounded fell upon them.

  “Goddamnit, run!”

  Fifty yards. The gate grew near; I could make out figures, some of them pointing at us. A spotlight flared on, lighting our distance, illuminating the dented but still intact sign that said kramer air force base. Now the shouts from within the base were spurring us on.

  The wolves closed on us. One, four legs fluid, beautiful in balletic motion, drew up beside me. His lamp eyes locked onto mine, rear legs tightened for his spring—

  The night was filled with the mad wails of wolves, and something else.

  The wolf beside me, in mid-leap, was cut neatly in half by a searing green pencil beam of light. I could not see momentarily because of its brilliance. I smelled the sizzle of burned flesh, a barbeque smell. The green light flashed again; three wolves that had been cutting the distance between us instantly went down.

  All around us, the night was severed by pencils of green brilliance. They fired and were gone, leaving death behind. I heard the boom of rockets and mortars, the popping crack of rifles. Kramer Air Force Base erupted like a Fourth of July celebration. Behind us, the howls of hate and lust turned to wails of pain.

  Through all the noise, someone shouted at me through the gate. I was close enough now to see his waving arms and hear him shouting, “Come on! Come on!” I glanced behind me. I had outdistanced the others by ten yards. As Cowboy stopped to pick off any wolves that strayed too close, Amy and Wyatt closed the distance between us. The night roared; overhead, rockets screamed out of the base into the line of beasts; the dull thump-thump of mortar launchings mingled with the snap of rifles and machine guns.

  Over and through it all, flitting darts of deadly green light were emitted from thin, long cannons which, I now saw, were emplaced every forty or fifty feet along the inside perimeter of the base.

  “Move it!” the man behind the gate shouted. He wore a torn and dirty NASA technician’s uniform. He pulled the gate open for our entrance.

  Pettis fired wildly into the air. Amy threw her empty handgun to the ground and ran on. Wyatt, between the two of them, ran desperately, gulping for air, a man at the end of his race straining for the finish line.

  Through tears of exhaustion and relief I saw the open gate; saw the encouraging, dirty face of the NASA technician; saw his hand reaching out for me—and, as my own hand stretched out for his saving hold, I saw out of the corner of my eye a wolf tearing wildly along the fence toward me, legs pushing it like a jet over the ground and then into the air—

  The world exploded in color and light. Green streaks of flame, three at once, intersected just above the wolf’s head, outlining it in lime fire. Its leap continued. As it raised its scythe-like claws I saw the badly healed wound in its shoulder and recognized the deformed limb of the wolf I had seen on the road twice since I had left my home. It angled its twisted front limb to slash at me, and I saw the single missing claw in its ravaged paw. Full recognition bloomed.

  “Richie!” I cried.

  A cannon boomed. I heard the staccato crack of Cowboy’s Uzi—and then my son fell upon me, his eyes madly yellow, his mouth open and hungry. And then I screamed his name again, and knew no more.

  CHAPTER 23

  The Waking

  There were many voices. Somewhere far off, I heard laughter.

  Laughter. More than anything, that spurred me to life, made me swim up from the formless dreams, the nightmares, the snippets of false existence that had been my life for—how long? I remembered wolf faces in my dreams, snapping at me, laughing a different kind of laughter, my torn flesh sprouting wild hair even as it was ripped living from my body.

  I opened my eyes. There was laughter, and faces around me, but they were human faces, Wyatt and Amy among them, and a man in a white coat who looked like a doctor, and a man in a NASA jumpsuit with a huge mustache and the bluest, steadiest eyes I have ever seen. I knew that face from television commercials, magazine ads, from the stereo in my living room days ago, telling me to come to Kramer Air Force Base, saving my life. I knew that face. Jimmy Rogers.

  “Jeez, he ain’t one of ‘em after all,” Rogers said, spitting tobacco juice. I heard it hit the floor somewhere.

  “Good to see you, Jase,” Wyatt Proctor said, helping me sit up.

  I tried to stay but felt dizzy and eased back down again.

  “You’ll feel fine in a little while,” the doctor said.

  “What happened to me?”

  The doctor answered with a grim smile. “You were cut by a wolf. He pointed to a long thin gash on my left forearm. “You were lucky that this was the only mark you received. The wound was superficial and drew a tiny amount of blood. We cleaned and sterilized it immediately. Then we gave you a transfusion. In effect, we replaced all of your blood.
Then…”

  “Heck,” Wyatt finished with mock cheerfulness, “then we waited all night to see if you were a wolf or a poet.” His smile faltered as my gaze fell on Cowboy, still cradling his Uzi.

  Cowboy reached out and gripped my shoulder. “I still have that book of yours with me,” he said quietly.

  “I’ll get to sign it, yet.”

  I sat up straight, as sudden, full remembrance came to me. “What about my son?”

  The look that passed between Pettis and the doctor sank my heart.

  “He’s…alive—” the doctor began.

  “He got cut up pretty bad,” Pettis said. “They think they can save him. He hasn’t exactly been cooperative.” Pettis studied me closely. “You’re sure he’s your son?”

  “Yes.” I turned to the doctor. “Can I see him?”

  “Later, possibly. If he stabilizes, we may be able to try something along the lines of what we did to you, though on a massive scale. We’ve had partial success with it so far. We think we’re close to perfecting it. The fact that you’ve recovered is extremely encouraging—”

  Even I noted the edge of hysteria in my voice. “You’ll be able to reverse it? To turn him back into my son?”

  “I don’t want to raise your hopes, but, yes, possibly,” the doctor said.

  My hopes soared. I felt suddenly strong.

  Pettis said, “There’s more good news, Jase. The Lexington is going up tonight and—”

  “Let me tell him,” Wyatt interrupted. He smiled at me. “We want you to go with us, if you can handle it. Seems you’re the only writer around, and we want you along as a historian, to put it all down for the record.”

  Jimmy Rogers, who had been listening quietly all this time, spat another line of brown tobacco juice at the floor. “Hell, he deserves it. Without him, we wouldn’t have gotten our hands on ole Wyatt here and would have missed our chance at blowing the Moon into little bitty pieces.”

  My jaw must have dropped five inches. “You’re going to blow up the Moon?”

  Rogers smiled, his mustache lifting over teeth stained tobacco brown. “Hell, son, now we can clean up this whole mess. We had the shuttle and Big Dumb Booster to get us to the Moon; we had all the nukes we need. All we had to have was Doc Bates, or Mr. Proctor here, to tell us where to drop ‘em. We put the bombs in the right place, we blow the Moon to little pieces and get a pretty ring around the Earth like Saturn. The ole Earth here will hardly feel a thing. No more wolves get to Earth. No more full Moon to power the wolves already here. We get this transfusion thing going, fix up the wolves we can, wipe out the rest.” He spat tobacco juice and smiled. “End of problem.”

  “So what do you say?” Cowboy asked. “If you trust the goddamn engineers that strapped the shuttle to that booster, there’s a lot you have to learn about the Lexington before tonight.”

  The doctor added, “I’ll give you the okay to go.”

  “Hell,” Jimmy Rogers said, his blue eyes twinkling, “it won’t be the safest trip in the world, and I can’t even promise it won’t be a little bumpy along the way.”

  “Well?” Wyatt asked.

  “When do we start?” I answered.

  CHAPTER 24

  Poetaster

  There was a lot to learn. But I was disappointed with how pedestrian our training was. Basically, they told us how to strap ourselves into our seats, how to go to the bathroom, and how to eat. Everything else, including the donning of space suits if necessary, was left to Jimmy Rogers and a thin, thoughtful-looking man named Hartnet, whose thin mustache made Rogers’s look huge by comparison. Hartnet, it turned out, was the detonation man in charge of the nuclear weapons in the shuttle bay. He looked a little nervous about the whole business.

  After our training session, we ate dinner in a huge hangar-like cafeteria with a long line of windows set in the side. Pettis drew me to a table where we could be alone. Through the windows I could see the Lexington, technicians swarming around it like hornets, jets of liquid oxygen puffing from the main tank of the huge booster. It looked cleaned and ready to go. Beyond it, another group of technicians worked on reinforcing the perimeter of the base, awaiting the coming of night.

  “You know the one thing about all this that makes me mad?” Pettis asked me. “We have to make a night landing on return. We’re gonna blow up the wolves’ home planet and then land in the middle of them when we come back. I don’t think they’ll be too happy with us.” He smiled wryly. “Goddamn engineers.”

  My gaze drifted out to the shuttle again, and Cowboy was silent, staring also.

  “In my wildest dreams,” I said, “I never thought I’d ride one of those things. I certainly never thought I’d get to the Moon. That was one of the things I hoped for my son, that he would get a chance to go to the Moon. When I was growing up, I used to go out alone in the back field, lie down, and watch it come up. It seemed like it was close enough to pluck out of the sky, like a peach.”

  “I used to like the Moon myself,” Cowboy said. “I remember in one of your poems, there was something about a tree—”

  “‘The tree of night, hung white with fruit,’” I quoted.

  “Well,” Cowboy nodded, looking out at the huge shuttle waiting for us outside, “we’re about to pluck the fruit from the night.”

  “Yes, we are,” I said.

  “Come with me,” said Cowboy.

  ~ * ~

  Richie was strapped to a table in a small white room. He looked less like my son than he ever had. Nearly one whole side of his body was covered in roughly applied bandages; the right side of his face was a mass of scar tissue, dried blood and hurriedly applied dressings. A catheter tube swung lazily next to the table, ripped from an entrance point in his arm. He thrashed against his bindings, growling low in the back of his throat.

  When he saw me his thrashings turned wild; his claws strained desperately to curl toward the straps to cut them, and his eyes glowed yellow-bright with hate. Now, suddenly, I was unsure if he was my son. He looked like any other of the mad creatures I had seen these past days—a raving, murderous animal with nothing but the extinction of the human race in its thoughts. There was none of the human glow I had seen once behind the lamp eyes; no remnant of the Richie who had saved my life and run off howling into the new world. There was only a lust to kill.

  “They tried everything to sedate him,” Pettis said. “Nothing works on them. They barely got him in here and strapped down and got the bleeding stopped before he came awake. He came very close to cutting up one of the nurses.”

  I edged closer, stirring the creature’s wrath, but now seeing clearly the marks of my ax on his shoulder, the missing claw on the middle finger of his left paw.

  “He’s my son,” I said quietly. “Somewhere deep inside, my son is still in there. I can’t believe he followed me here only out of hate.”

  Pettis put his hand on my arm. “We’d better go.”

  “I’ll be back for you,” I said to Richie. “I promise, I’ll be back.”

  I went back with Pettis to the cafeteria, where there were other good-byes to be made. I watched Cowboy embrace Amy. She pulled a clutch of opened seed packets from her pocket. “I planted these outside this afternoon,” she said. “There’s a little plot next to where I’m staying. When you get back we’ll watch them grow together, for Mom.”

  “We will,” Cowboy said, holding her close.

  They looked out the big windows, and I followed their gaze to the Lexington, which stood tall, waiting for us.

  “Shouldn’t you be saying something profound?” Cowboy asked me.

  “I know what you mean.” The moment was ripe with allusions: the parting of families, humanity on the threshold of a great and dangerous adventure, a bold last attempt at salvation of the human race—the very apex of human endeavor. But I had nothing. My brain was dry. Perhaps at no other moment in human history was a statement so necessary, a word or phrase that would capture this supreme moment for future generations. I fe
lt Cowboy waiting for me—in a way I felt all of mankind waiting for me—

  And then, across the room, Jimmy Rogers did my work for me. He called for attention, and, spitting a wad of tobacco juice, he grinned under his huge mustache, pointed out the long windows at the shuttle waiting for us, and shouted, “Showtime!”

  CHAPTER 25

  The Light Comes Brighter

  I watched the Lexington in awe as we neared it. It resembled an arrogant yet fragile bird. Yet it would soon rise as no bird flew, straight up out of Earth’s grasp under the power of the largest rocket ever made by man. The Big Dumb Booster, a huge bottom bulge of rockets resembling a cluster of Saturn V’s strapped together, was frightening: a manmade Zeus, or, possibly, a Trojan Horse, filled with tons upon tons of deadly explosive rocket fuel.

  A knot formed in my stomach; in essence, we would be sitting in a winged toy, on top of the largest stick of dynamite ever made.

  Hartnet, the nuke man, who walked beside me in his shuttle jumpsuit, was as pale as I was.

  “Hell,” he muttered, “I don’t even like riding in cars.”

  “I’ll help you through it,” I said.

  He grinned. “And who’s gonna help you?”

  We stopped at the base of the launch pad and marched to the gantry like any other shuttle crew. Someone took pictures. Someone else said, “Go get ‘em.”

  “You betcha,” Jimmy Rogers said, firing a long stream of tobacco juice to the ground.

  We followed Rogers into the elevator, which rose along the tiled white flank of the shuttle. The American flag on the Lexingtons side, which had looked so small from the ground, was the height of a man.

  The elevator snapped to a halt, and Rogers ushered us in. He stayed behind, spitting one last stream of tobacco juice off the gantry before ejecting his chewing tobacco after it.