Moonbane

MOONBANE

by Al Sarrantonio

Copyright 2010 by Al Sarrantonio

Prologue

~ * ~

Man of shadows and cratered light:

Alabaster plains,

Seas of tranquil dust—

You know a secret.

What word would you tell

Had you a single cold breath above?

What word would it be?

Would it be Love?

~ * ~

I’ve never been happy with the last line of that poem. I wrote it after Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in the summer of 1969, when the scientists and newspapermen started saying the Moon had been conquered and was a dead place, not interesting anymore. I walked out late one night during that same summer, and looked up and saw the Man in the Moon, and I asked him if he really was dead and buried. He gazed down at me, silver-white, inscrutable, and I went in and wrote a poem that I called “The Secret.”

I thought it was a pretty good poem, but I had some trouble with the last lines—partly because, despite the effect that moonlight is supposed to have on lovers, I did not feel love emanating from it that night. I felt something else, something disquieting almost.

I wrestled with the last lines of my poem that night, the way poets are supposed to, but finally I gave up and left them like they were and went out and looked at the Man in the Moon again. He was high overhead, staring balefully down at me. Only now he didn’t look like a man at all, but like some other animal, one I had seen and could almost recognize—

I went out and looked at the Man in the Moon on many other nights after that, and always I had the same feeling of uneasiness, that he knew something we on Earth, with all our smug technology and Moon landers, didn’t.

And then it became December of 1989, twenty years after that first Apollo landing, and the Man in the Moon told his secret.

And now I wonder, as I write this in a place I never dreamed of being, on the way to a place that soon will no longer exist, if poetry has a place in a world in which most of the scientists and newspapermen are dead, in which I watched my dear wife die, in which my own son was transformed into something inhuman and monstrous, in which…

Let me tell you.

CHAPTER 1

The Far Field

“Look, Dad, another one!”

Not any December night will do. It must be, and always was, the night of December thirteenth when the comet trail swept through the blue Earth, when the tiny flashing specks of gold known as the Geminid meteor shower gave the pre-Christmas sky an early present.

It was bone cold, but neither Richie nor I cared. There were parkas on our backs; the night was as crisp as a McIntosh apple. If we got too cold the house was only thirty feet away, but neither myself nor my twelve-year-old son had made a move to go in. I knew Emily was watching television in there under a pile of quilts, and she knew we were out here freezing; but since we were both happy, who cared?

“There went another one,” I said as a dim flash caught the corner of my eye.

Fifty meteors an hour, the books said, and that was about what we’d seen. Not all of them came out of the constellation Gemini (the Twins—something Emily sometimes called Richie and me), but no matter where you saw a meteor trail in the sky, you could trace it back to the constellation that gave the shower its name. Only the Perseids in the summer were better.

“Whoa! Two!” Richie shouted, and I caught one of them right in front of my eyes. It was the biggest we’d seen yet—and the trail it made was white and wide, curving downward. I traced it back and found that it didn’t originate in the Gemini cluster of stars.

“That wasn’t a Geminid,” I said.

“A sporadic?”

“Had to be—”

I stopped talking as another fireball, the head a brightly lit bulb, the tail a long arcing stream of fire, arched overhead and down to the horizon behind us.

“Wow,” Richie said, and this time we both traced the path back and found that it didn’t come from Gemini either.

“That’s weird,” Richie said.

I nodded. “Guess we’re just lucky tonight.”

“Guess I’m just freezing,” Richie said. I noticed he was hugging himself.

A Geminid meteor fizzed overhead, dull and fleeting compared to the two fireballs we’d seen.

“Want to go in?” I said it so that it sounded like it didn’t matter if he left me or not, because he knew that I would stay out half the night.

“Little while,” he said, looking longingly at the front door to the farmhouse a mere ten yards away, outlined in the darkness. Vaguely silhouetted against the front picture window was the Christmas tree we’d put up that afternoon, surrounded by the boxes of ornaments we would hang on it tomorrow.

I was staring at the bowl of night over us, at the black fabric of sky shot with a billion pinpoints of soft starlight. The Milky Way snaked gauzily from east to west, the rim of our own galaxy spread like a gently whirling strip across the sky. The Moon, which before too long would ruin with its light the relatively fragile illumination of the Geminids, was just rising on the eastern horizon, fat and orange-yellow. I wanted to aim the white tube of our telescope at it when it came up; the news had briefly mentioned some strange activity in the Oceanus Procellarum region in the northwest quadrant, currently in shadow, which had the astronomers baffled. But the Moon was too low yet, and the sight of the whole, richly starred sky spread above me made me forget about the telescope as I scanned the sky from horizon to horizon.

“Dad—” Richie began, and I will remember the way his voice sounded at that moment because it was the last time his voice ever had that sound in it—“I want to do something but I don’t want to hurt your feelings”—that tone that told me he wanted to go in. But instead of finishing the sentence he turned his eyes upward and pointed with a gloved hand, forgetting how cold he was.

“Jesus Christ.”

I was going to tell him not to talk like that but then I saw what he meant, and I repeated his exclamation.

The sky was filled with meteors streaming overhead at a frightening rate, huge bolides like the two we had seen before. They seemed to rise up from the eastern horizon like fiery missiles. I thought I heard a faint whoosh as they passed overhead. In their background I saw a weak Geminid, and I tried to trace some of these monster fireballs, but they all came from the horizon and not from some recognizable star group. I thought for a fleeting second that they might indeed be some sort of aircraft, perhaps even (all those science fiction movies I’d seen in the 1950s produced this thought) some secret government project gone haywire. There had been times at sunset when I’d seen weather balloons pass overhead from Kramer Air Force Base, a good hundred and fifty miles to the west. But I just had a gut feeling that what we were witnessing had nothing to do with them.

There were hundreds of them now—then thousands. The sky was turned from night nearly today, and now I heard a distinct, air-splitting scream as one passed so low overhead that it looked more like a landing aircraft than a celestial object. There was still nothing visible but a huge glowing orange head followed by a long tail, but I swear I even felt its heat. It vanished in the west, but I saw a flash of light over the dip of the horizon and heard a vague, thumping explosion.

Richie and I looked at one another.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

I wished I could tell him; I wish at this moment, as I write this, that I’d known then and could have done something to prevent what happened afterward. But all I did was look at him and say, “I don’t know.”

Like good amateur astronomers, we tried to count the fireballs. But there were just too many. I saw six huge ones go over at once, with a backdrop of higher monsters, thirty, forty, eighty, a hundred. It looked as though there were layers of them. For a scary moment I thought of a World War II film with squadrons of B-29 bombers flying in formation to their targets, opening their bomb-bay doors, dropping their deadly cargo—

“Maybe we’d better go in,” I suggested.

“Are you kidding?”

“Richie,” I persisted, but I dropped my thoughts as something truly terrifying came at us.

For a moment I thought the sun had risen. It came from the direction of the rising Moon, a huge, waxing ball of light that grew and grew, brightening to almost painful intensity. I heard a rumble, like distant thunder rolling much too fast, and then a roar as the thing flashed straight at us. I shouted, pushing my son down, but it was a futile gesture—if the fireball was going to hit us, it would have by then. There was a crash behind us, a thudding boom, and then, mercifully, silence. I looked up from the ground and saw, off at the far end of our field, a thin plume of smoke and a glow like dying embers on the ground.

Richie pushed himself to his feet and stood staring at the crash site. “A meteorite!” he shouted. “Dad, we’ve got a meteorite!”

He made a move toward it, but I held his arm. “I think we’d better take it easy.”

“Why?” he said. And at that moment I had to ask myself the same question. What was bothering me? Something was trying to fight its way into my thoughts, some indistinct memory of standing out here on other nights and having the same unsettling feeling I had now. Wasn’t this just a freak meteor shower? What else could it be? For no rational reason I looked at the Moon, and as I did so a tiny voice, a voice that had perhaps been planted in the back of my mind a long time ago, said—

Run.

“Richie,” I said slowly, “let’s go in the house.”

He had already started to walk toward the far field. He stopped and looked at me, his face momentarily flushed by the light of a passing fireball. The lines of fire were still passing overhead, though by now there were not as many as there had been. I heard a high-pitched whistle and saw another one streak low overhead, landing somewhere beyond our property.

“I said let’s go in.”

He looked evenly at me, and I knew instantly that we had reached one of those bridges that all fathers and sons have to cross. William Faulkner wrote about it in The Bear, in which a father and son’s roughhousing abruptly became a battle for supremacy. It’s the Oedipus thing, of course, but since I don’t believe in Freudian psychology (one of my best friends in college, a psychology major, said that the only reason Freud invented psychoanalysis was because he needed it himself so badly), it must be something else. I prefer to call it growing up. Every father knows that sooner or later his son or daughter will stop thinking that he knows everything, and that maybe there are a few things they know better themselves.

“Dad, you’re not scared, are you?”

“Richie, I just have a feeling…”

He stood with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his parka, staring at me in the darkness.

“Son,” I began sternly.

And then I did the stupidest thing of my life.

“All right,” I said, “what the heck.”

We crossed the unplowed field together. Though this was a farm, I only rented the house, and nothing had been planted on the tired soil of the place for ten or fifteen years. We had to make our way carefully through old furrows hardened by many winters.

Richie looked up at me, and suddenly he smiled. Overhead, I noticed that the fireballs had become truly sporadic, one and then another streaking silently. Behind them, I once more saw a wan, unhearty trail of one of the Geminids.

I smiled back at my son, but it was a faint one.

“I think it fell over this way,” Richie said. He was pushing enthusiastically on. I saw a thinning plume of steam up ahead.

“There,” Richie said. I lost him for a moment, behind a clump of tall bush, but then I came around and he was there, standing before a hissing pile of what looked at first like charcoal briquettes. When I got closer I saw what really was there: a circular pit four feet wide, a foot deep. A single glowing piece of rock sat in the center. I smelled ozone, and something else—a faint, familiar smell that at first I couldn’t identify.

“Don’t touch it,” I said, as Richie reached out a hand. “It might be hot.”

He pulled his hand back. “Maybe I should get a stick,” he said and immediately went searching for one.

This left me alone with the thing. That feeling deep down inside began to act up again. But having rationalized it away once, it was easier this time to suppress it. Here was my twelve-year-old son, my boy, looking for a stick so he could poke at a rock from space, and his father, a former teacher, a published poet, a respected man, wanted to cower like a child and hide.

If only that’s what I’d done; if only I’d dragged Richie into the house, dragged my wife from bed and locked the three of us in the cellar, bolting and barricading the door behind us…

Richie returned with a long straight bough, the victim of a summer lightning strike on one of the oaks that bordered the field. He stood over the meteor for a moment, and then edged the stick toward it. “I wonder how heavy it is,” he said, to himself as well as to me. The stick bent when it touched the roughly pyramidal mass, but the meteorite moved a bit.

Richie stepped in closer, one booted foot slipping down into the crater. He had both hands on the stick, pushing the rock toward the other side of the hole, trying to flip it over.

Suddenly I took him by the shoulder and yanked him back.

The same odd look of defiance he had shown before crossing his face. But then he saw what I meant, and his expression changed.

“Oh,” he said, stepping out of the hole and next to me.

The meteorite was moving on its own. Or, rather, the pointed end of the pyramid was. Tiny fissures had formed on the cooling stone, a network of cracks that resembled the pattern on the surface of a hatching egg.

That grip of prescience took hold of me again. Once more—fatefully this time—the look of wonder on my son’s face shamed me into doing nothing about it.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I don’t know.” One side of the pyramid had flaked away, a portion perhaps six or eight inches long. Now something that couldn’t quite get out was pushing at the neighboring face of the rock, working it till it, too, began to drop away. That smell I had detected earlier, which I still couldn’t place, was stronger.

Overhead, a last large meteor passed by, disappearing like a flare in the west. The sky was empty, except for the Moon, which had risen full and stood balanced over the eastern horizon, and the scattering of bright stars it wasn’t able to drown. The Geminid meteors were completely engulfed by the gray-white light of Luna.

I didn’t rebuke him, because again I repeated the same exclamation. A tiny limb, a paw it looked like, had pushed out from the fractured rock in the crater. It was quickly followed by the rest of the body, which fell to the ground and formed into a tight, nearly fetal shape. As we watched, a membrane, thin and yellowing, nearly transparent, melted away from the stretching body of the thing, and it was left panting feebly in the ditch its falling carrier had formed.

That smell again—that smell…

“It’s a puppy!” Richie exclaimed, and at that exact moment I realized what that smell was. “Richie!” I shouted, but he had impulsively stepped into the crater and reached down his gloved hand to the stirring dog shape that lay there, waving its paws with growing vigor, its tiny snout sniffing at the unfamiliar air, its eyes like gold coins, the light in them growing. It had a thin, emaciated body and a long slim tail, nearly hairless.

“Richie!” I screamed, reaching for him, but it was too late, and the next image was one that has come to me in my many nightmares every night since.

The tiny dog struggled on its side, moving its hind legs beneath; then abruptly, forcefully, it sprang and took hold of Richie by the hand with its teeth. I saw the bright flash of them as its small mouth opened: two sharp half circles, upper and lower, like blue-white razors. Even as Richie tried to pull back, the thing’s mouth closed on his glove, holding tight like a sprung trap.

Richie’s scream was an unearthly thing. Even more terrifying was the sound the creature made as it dropped the glove, a strong, piercing howl that echoed around the field like a triumphant bray.

The beast, with Richie’s glove still in its writhing mouth, fell back into the hole. Richie fell into my arms, and I began to pull him backward. For a moment I could still see clearly down into the crater, and my blood froze at the sight of the little monster in there, biting through the leather glove like a sharply honed machine, then spitting it aside. Already, it had grown. Its front paws were still unsteady, or I’m sure it would have leaped from the ditch at me. It did look up at me, though, with its huge, almond-shaped yellow eyes, and I swear it grinned, with a smile that Lucifer himself would have envied.

Then it turned its head, looked at the Moon rising majestically above the Earth, and let out a blood-curdling howl.

I backpedaled away from the hole, lifting my moaning son up into my arms. He lay limply.

“Richie,” I said, but his eyes were glazed, showing only pain. I turned and ran for the house.

As I reached the porch, fumbling with the front door, screaming for Emily to help, I looked back toward the far edge of the field. The thing had not yet followed me. But I saw its now-grown head rearing up out of the hole, turning to look at me—

The porch light went on. The door opened, showing my wife, hair disheveled, eyes widening. I nearly fell toward her, screaming for her to close and bolt the door. As she did so I heard the creature in the field howl once more, its wail answered by another and then another howl from somewhere in the distance.

“Oh, God, oh, God,” I said, laying my son on the couch, seeing where the thing had gotten its teeth into the tips of his two middle fingers, shearing one of them clear off, the other attached by a mere thread of cut bone.

And it was then, as shock began to give way to other feelings, that I remembered again what that smell was, the smell that had come over my world like a poison cloud when the fiery meteor had crashed into my life. It explained all my unnamed apprehensions, my feelings of supposed cowardice in front of my son. I knew now why I had wanted to run so badly.

I had smelled that odor once before, long ago when I was Richie’s age, when one night my friends and I stumbled onto a derelict under an abandoned railroad bridge. We thought he was sleeping, propped up against the wet side of the tunnel with his head down, one arm thrown out against the stone underneath for support. But when we got closer we saw that he was not sleeping but was dead, and that there were things crawling in and out of his mouth and nose and eyes, and over his hands and feet where white bone showed. And we ran away yelling, not only from the sight, but also from the smell of decomposing flesh that had surrounded it.

But that was not all.

The thing that had made this smell come back to me with such force this night when I had smelled it again, and which had rounded up all the little fears into an insistent frightened voice that had told me to run and hide and save my family, was the fact that we had run away from the railway tunnel, my friends and I, under the light of a full Moon.

CHAPTER 2

The Beast

When I turned from Richie to my wife, there was a look on her face I had never seen before. I don’t know if it was an instinctive thing—I still am confused about the supposed difference between the sexes, and the supposed unique ability of females to sense a situation and act accordingly; I believe to this day that that ability is derived more from adapting to situations than from genetics—but that night, at that moment, my wife knew what was happening. And instead of weeping, like some hysterical, foolish movie heroine, or falling back on my mythical strength as male provider, she forced the last of latent sleep from her eyes and turned to the closet in the front hallway, producing the shotgun her brother had given me two years before, over my protestations.

He had told me calmly, in the way that country people tell city people who, to them, are basically filled with nonsense, that I would need it. “You may not need it to hunt, or drive off some burglar, or to threaten your neighbor who starts digging up the north end of your garden with his tractor and ignores your protests, but you’ll need it.” When I tried to get him to take it back with him, to tell me why, if none of those things he had said would come to pass, I would possibly need a shotgun, he just waved me off like a stupid child and said, “Put it in the closet, Jason.”

Emily pulled down the bulky box of cartridges from the closet shelf. She then went to the front door and turned off the porch light. She stood silhouetted in the hallway by dim moonlight.

She cocked the shotgun open and pushed two shells into it. “What was it, Jase? Dog?” Her voice was eerily calm.

“It wasn’t a dog,” I said, still in shock.

Richie let out a cry, and Emily lowered the gun and joined me.

I had stopped the bleeding in his fingers; the cuts had been quick and clean and my scarf had served as a compress. Emily went into the bathroom; I saw a stab of yellow light cut into the back hallway as she turned the switch on. She returned with our first-aid kit, and as she worked on the hand with ointment I tried to get Richie to look at me.

His eyes were milky; though he called my name he didn’t see me. He stared feverishly into another world. I held a cool washcloth to his forehead. He waved his unhurt hand in front of him, murmuring, “Dad? No!” again and again.

“Tell me what did this,” Emily said.

The howling started outside. There was a clipped yelp, close by, and then three or four answering cries from far off. The hair on my arms stood up, and I turned to Emily and said, “That.”

I got up, squeezing her arm, and walked to the living-room window. I had to shoulder my way around the Christmas tree. The nostalgically pungent odor of balsam that filled my nostrils as I brushed it made a strange contrast to the horror of what was happening.

A large, dark shadow darted past the edge of my vision. A cold fist tightened in my stomach. If that was the thing we had left in the ditch at the far end of the field, it had grown to at least six feet in height in less than an hour.

There was a small window in the back bedroom on that side of the house. I sprinted to it. It was covered with Venetian blinds. I turned the wand slowly to open them. I saw darkness, a thin cut of lawn bordered by bushes, the squeezed vertical fingers of a stockade fence.

And then movement.

By the bushes, moving on around to the back of the house, was something tall and stooped, with the grace of an athlete, the head of a dog, long limbs, large paws.

Then it was gone.

I moved to the other window. I slowly turned the blinds, and they revealed the beast standing on the other side of the window glass, staring in at me.

This was not the face of a dog, or even a wolf. There was too much intelligence in it for any animal. It was a face that made me think of fire. It was all eyes and teeth, the eyes wide, yellow unending flame, the teeth long white razors.

I was sure it would slam through the window glass, clutch me in its teeth, and devour me. I watched its body tense, its eyes go deep and wide with hunger—

“Jase? Can you see anything?” Emily called from out front.

The beast gave a sudden unearthly howl and leapt away from the window.

“My God,” I gasped, and then I was running for the living room. “Emily!” I screamed. “No!”

She was just nudging her way past the Christmas tree when the front picture window exploded toward her. She never had a chance to raise the shotgun. There was an implosion of glass and wood frame as the window shattered.

It was over almost before it began. There was a blur of movement—huge yellow eyes, piranha-like teeth, upraised claws, a dark-haired body. Its mouth was open impossibly wide. It made an unearthly sound, something between a scream and a howl of triumph, and Emily was engulfed by the beast.

There was no chance to save her. I had barely taken a step toward her when the thing’s paws had lowered in frightfully swift arcs, talons extended like sabers, and blood exploded around her. Then its teeth were upon her. She didn’t even have time to cry out. The shotgun dropped uselessly to the floor at her feet, followed by her severed arms. Then the rest of her seemed to disappear in a haze of blood and ripped flesh. I saw her dying eyes turn to find Richie, and then she was gone. The monster fell to her corpse like a mongrel crazed with hunger and death lust.

Despite the horror of what I had seen, my only thought was to save my son. I lifted Richie from the couch and ran to the kitchen, throwing open the door to the cellar. I snapped on the light and struggled to secure the door behind me. I felt how flimsy it was; a cheap security lock set into a glued sandwich of wood chip and veneered oak. It would barely hold back a grammar-school child, never mind the raving horror that at this moment stood howling in my living room.

I turned the lock on the outside of the door and closed it nevertheless. Cradling my son, I brought him down and lay him on an old couch that butted one wall of the rumpus room I had put together. I ran to the workshop at the other end of the cellar, grabbed two strong two-by-fours and an armful of wood pieces scattered about along with nails and a hammer.

I bounded up the stairs and pounded the two-by-fours across the door, then nailed the smaller pieces around the circumference. It was the best I could do, but I doubted it would be enough. Sounds still issued from the front room of the house. I returned to the rumpus room to find Richie asleep, his breathing regular.

I put my hand gently on his head. “Oh, Richie,” I said, and suddenly I began to tremble.

Shock is an inefficient biological method of protection. There is a threshold of terror beyond which shock will dissolve and throw the patient into a more heightened reality.

I sat helpless on the edge of the couch, the one my wife and I had bought the week before our marriage, the one we had had our first argument over (a silly fight over fabric, corduroy versus a silky rose pattern she favored; she had won, and for the next year I harbored a barely hidden resentment that sometimes flared into outright ammunition during subsequent fights), and now, though my own death be near, all I could think of was that fight, and how I had acted like a schoolboy after losing. I had once written of that other Emily, Emily Dickinson, transmuting my love for my wife into a feigned bond with the dead poet of Amherst:

~ * ~

Emily—

Do I know you?

Do I really feel

What I believe?

Your life was mine—

Your hundred-year bones

Lie with me now.

Were you tortured, shy?

Or was your anguish deeper still—

A boldness of mind

Encased in dreadful face?

Can I say these things without a lie?

Were your dashes all mistakes—

Archaic device—

Or rather helpless insecurities Caught in vain ice?

~ * ~

And now my own Emily was gone.

It was an inconceivable blow, smitten on an inconceivable night.

In that place beyond shock, I did lose control of myself, then. Life, I decided, was not to be lived without my Emily. The hammer was on the floor next to me; I remember rising, and concluding that it would be best to walk calmly up the steps, remove the impediments to the door’s opening, and throw it wide, inviting my own extinction. And, I remember thinking ironically, in that strange state I was in, if religion be right after all, I would enjoy an immediate reunion with my beloved.

I believe I reached the first step of the cellar stairs before the final image of my wife’s face, as she had turned to Richie, striving for his salvation, rose before me. To do what I contemplated, even in madness, would be a betrayal beyond forgiveness.

And then my son called me, and I dropped the hammer, all thoughts of destruction and betrayal banished.

“Dad,” he murmured. It was a weak summons, but it might as well have been a cry from a mountaintop for the joy and hope it gave me.

I dropped the hammer and rushed back to his side. He was lost behind the swirling, feverish mists of his eyes, but then he found his way back to clarity.

He panted my name and then he added, “They…”

“What is it, Richie?” I held him as he receded to delirium. I could almost feel him fighting unconsciousness.

His eyes cleared, and suddenly he was Richie again. For a moment I thought that he was going to laugh. But his mouth was twisted in terror, and my cry of thanks for the return of my son froze on my lips as he stared wildly into my eyes and pleaded, “Kill me. Oh, God. Dad, kill me!”

His eyes clouded, then closed, and he went limp in my arms.

I thought I had lost him. But his even breath told me that he was asleep. I laid him down and sat stroking his head, thinking of what he had said. Delirium must still hold him. I thought of the beast that had done this to him.

I picked up the hammer, but this time it was to face and kill whatever chose to break through my feeble defenses and try to take my son from me.

CHAPTER 3

Lull

But nothing came. And that was, in many ways, worse than facing the thing that had leapt through the front window of my house.

As the minutes wore on, I realized just how vulnerable we were. There were foundation windows around the cellar, five in all, and any one of them would provide easy entry. One blow would knock any of them inward off their simple hooks and eyes. I thought of the commercials I had so recently sneered at for house shutters—a complete and repulsively antiseptic form of blocking the home out from the rest of the world. Or so I had thought at the time. The commercials showed cheery, mostly older folks pushing a button and then standing back as steel slats rolled down from housings mounted above doors and windows. The home then became a fortress. The commercials had produced disgust in me, a disgust in the cynicism of a people who would happily shut themselves off from the rest of the world. That sort of society would eventually crumble in on itself, as communication between its members degenerated into a paranoid network of purely business contact. The unit-fortress represented to me the ultimate triumph of alienation.

I thought of all my pompous reasoning in that cellar with my son and laughed—at that moment I would have gladly given my right arm for house shutters, followed by my right leg for an electrified fence. Limbs for weapons; by the time I was finished there would have been little left of me.

I thought of boarding the baseboard windows. But I had little left in the way of scrap wood in my workshop. Even if I had, by that time I wondered if it would be wise to make any noise. I had heard nothing from upstairs in nearly an hour. Any noise might merely draw the thing to my son and me. It seemed incredible that it did not know that we were down here, especially after the glare of hateful intelligence I had seen in the thing’s face through the bedroom window. But I was not about to test its aptitude without good reason.

Maybe it had gone away. Maybe—

There was a sound, and my thoughts froze in place. I stood rigid over my workbench, hammer in hand, light from the family room spilling into the rectangle of doorway that separated my dark shop from the rest of the cellar. The sound came again.

Floorboards creaking.

It was directly over my head. I had a horrible vision of the thing peering down through the floor at me, its teeth arched painfully back into a mockery of a smile, its Atlas-like forearm gearing back to smash right through the oak parquet, slicing me in half, the monster howling in pleasure as the life pumped out of my severed body, my mind dimming, the last of my sight beholding the still-bright gleam in its chrome-yellow eyes as it yanked me up before it, holding me like a child holds a doll that has caused displeasure, and its mouth gimballing wide open, its knife-paw dropping me into that gleaming razor-filled cave of darkness…

The floorboards above me creaked as the monster moved away.

I am not good at direction. I spent the next twenty seconds frantically calculating what room was directly over the workshop. It was the back bedroom, the one through whose Venetian blinds the thing had faced me. The thing was leaving the bedroom, snarling and throwing things as it went. I followed it with my ears, out into the hallway. I crept out of the workshop. The footpads ceased again. Then there was rapid movement down the hallway into the kitchen, followed by a pause at the top of the cellar steps.

My heart declined to beat.

I stood at the bottom of the steps, waiting. If it was going to break the door and come, let it. Nothing happened. It did not move away. My ears were so attuned now to its movement that I would have heard it. It simply stood there.

Waiting was madness. If I had counted seconds I’m sure not more than thirty would have gone by, but it seemed as if the sun and Moon had traded places in the sky over and over. The muscles in my right hand where I gripped my futile hammer stood out like hard rivers and tributaries, and my hand began to go numb.

Still the thing stood unmoving at the cellar door.

Finally, I could take it no longer. I had actually opened my mouth to shout, “Come on, bastard,” when the thing walked away.

I was overcome with both relief and rage. A part of me had wanted—was ready—to face the beast that had destroyed my family.

With my ears, I followed its movements to the front of the house. I heard broken glass being stepped on, the sound of something thrown, and then nothing.

The night had suddenly grown quiet.

I thought of the cellar windows again. For a terrified moment I thought I caught the glint of a yellow eye in one of the panes, but it was the reflection of the light bulb over my workbench, which went out, then glowed back up to life as the generator out in the barn kicked in automatically.

I went back to where Richie slept peacefully. I slipped down to the floor with my back against the couch. My right arm ached; I looked down and saw the hammer still clutched spasmodically in my hand. With an effort of will I opened my fingers and placed it on the floor next to me.

One of the cellar windows faced me, and I stared at it, but no wolf face stared back.

I kept staring, and the night wore on. Eventually, my hand went to the hammer at my side and stayed there.

CHAPTER 4

The Lost Son

My son called to me as the sun began to rise.

I must have dozed, because it had been dark and had stayed dark and in my dream I was fighting a legion of wolves. I had a flashlight in my hand, and when I turned it on they howled, and when I hit them with the lighted flashlight their howls turned to screams and they disappeared in a puff of smoke. And then all their screams merged into one unbearable sound, and my eyes opened to the orange of creeping daylight coming into the room and my son screaming behind me.

Still throwing my sleep aside, I reached back for him but he wasn’t on the couch. He continued to scream. I know the sound that had awakened me was him crying my name in a horrible paroxysm of agony, but now the sounds he was making bore little resemblance to human articulation. He sounded as though he was choking on his tongue.

“Richie?” I called out, forcing myself to my feet. His screaming continued.

He was crouched in the far corner of the room, half hidden by an old easy chair with a threadbare red slipcover on it. There was a reading lamp next to the chair. Richie’s arms flailed out, knocking it over. The bulb smashed on the tiled floor.

My son’s unearthly cries continued.

“My God, Richie—” I shouted, moving to take him in my arms, but at that instant he turned to confront me.

The front of his jacket was sliced to shreds. The fingers of his hands had grown out to nearly twice their length. The nails were curved down into sharp talons. His hands were elongated, covered with a mat of long, bristled, dark brown fur.

His face was that of a wolf.

Richie was gone, replaced by this…thing.

This was the face of the beast I had seen through the window: a hateful, yellow-eyed visage consumed by cunning if not devious intelligence.

He pulled himself erect, regarding me like a wary dog. His body had been forced into a longer, bonier frame; there was a sharp bend at the shoulder where it met the neck, almost humping the back into the head. It was a physique that gave the impression of immense and concentrated power.

The creature that had been my son snarled at me and tensed. I searched his eyes frantically for some sign that my boy was still in there but found nothing except deep yellow hate.

“Richie,” I pleaded, but at that moment he struck.

If the transformation from my son to wolf had been complete, I would surely have been killed. The lower part of his body was still pushing into shape, and so he jumped at me awkwardly, with the legs of a twelve-year-old boy. He landed in front of me instead of upon me, and I threw him aside with my forearm. He staggered and fell, his legs collapsing. As he landed, the legs of Richie’s jeans ripped through their seams. The new, powerfully muscled legs bulged out. His sneakers burst apart, revealing long, powerful hind feet.

The hammer was four feet behind me, next to the couch. I scrambled to retrieve it. At that confused moment I could have done the beast in. But the sight of what my son had become prevented me; the vision of this thing still in the rags of my son’s clothes, wearing his body, stayed my hand, giving him the opportunity to recover.

He pulled himself into a crouch a half-dozen feet from me, and regarded me sullenly.

I thought of my son’s pleading with me to kill him, and now I knew what he meant.

And then something happened to give me hope. The creature squinted through the rectangle of one of the cellar windows at the brightening day and flinched. A look of uncertainty crossed his face. Like a drowning man I clutched at the debris of my memory. Didn’t werewolves in the movies change back to men during the day? Wasn’t it the Moon—and then only the full Moon—that held sway over their affliction? I remembered reading actual cases of psychological lycanthropy. The Moon was always involved. Now the Moon was gone—could it be my son would reemerge?

In answer, the wolf snarled, turned abruptly from the window, and leapt at me again.

Again he landed in front of me, but this time he did not fall. He raised one forearm and swung the long curling knives of his claws at me. I feinted with my left hand, then, praying that the blow was hard enough but not too hard, I brought the hammer down on the exposed left side of his head.

He collapsed with a grunting cry.

There was a roll of good, stiff lamp cord in my workshop, and I trussed him up, using tight knots, binding all four paws together from behind. I rolled him onto his side and stood regarding him. I knew my son, knew the shape of his body, and this was no longer him.

His bright eyes opened and his jaws snapped out at me. He missed, and I stepped back as he flailed upon the floor, trying to break the bonds.

I walked to the cellar stairs and sat heavily on the first step. The wolf’s eyes followed me with sullen malice; then he resumed his attempts to free himself. He sounded like a rabid animal, and I stared at the shredded rags of my son’s clothing that remained on the wolf’s body.

“Oh, Richie,” I sobbed, “what in God’s name is happening?”

The wolf stopped its exertion and gave me its chilling stare.

I stared back, unbelieving, and the early day wore on.

CHAPTER 5

The Reckoning

In the late afternoon I decided to go upstairs. I dreaded what I would find, including the remains of my wife. But the rest of the world was up there also, including the food that would ease the hunger that had begun to gnaw at me. There was a radio upstairs; there was a television. My access to the government that must surely be aware of this horror by now, if not in control of it, was upstairs. I had heard no further sounds since the beast had left the night before, and I assumed the house was empty. Even if it wasn’t, I was determined to face whatever dangers lay above, in the hope of rescue and possible salvation for my son (wasn’t it possible that the government already had the problem in hand, and that a way would be found shortly to return my son to humanity?).

The wolf had fallen into a fitful sleep. I went as close as I dared. The lamp cord looked secure.

“I’ll be back,” I whispered, telling myself I was talking to Richie, and then I turned to go.

I gripped the hammer in one hand. My two back pockets held a flathead screwdriver and a carpet knife.

At the top of the stairs, keeping as quiet as I could, I pried the boards from the door using the hammer and screwdriver.

As I pulled the second two-by-four away from the frame, I thought I heard a sound from above. I waited a twenty count. There was nothing further so I resumed yanking the board away with the peculiar ripping sound that only nails released from wood make.

I lay the two-by-four aside and slowly turned the doorknob. It went a quarter turn, then resisted. It was then that I remembered that I had locked it from the other side. There was no way of unlocking it from the cellar side.

I spent the next half hour gouging the lock set from the door, first gently using the screwdriver, digging into the soft, cheap veneer of the door, and then, giving up all pretense of quiet, hammering on the screwdriver, and then, in frustration, taking the hammer to the side of the knob until the entire mechanism gave in and broke. The knob on the other side of the door fell to the floor, leaving me with the other knob in my hand, and a four-inch ragged hole in the door.

I stepped back and pulled the door open by the hole.

Quiet assaulted me. I knew I had awakened the thing in the cellar, but it had become very still, as though it waited to see what would happen.

I looked out onto the same view of the kitchen the cellar opening had always showed. But there was a violent difference. The kitchen was in a shambles. One end of the long table was covered with debris. A chair was knocked onto its back. A scattering of objects, mostly broken, including a little Dutch girl ceramic that my wife had treasured after our honeymoon trip to the Netherlands.

My transmogrified son, almost as if he could see through my eyes, let out a bray of triumphant glee from the cellar and resumed his thrashing about.

I stepped into the hallway, gingerly avoiding the broken frame of a photograph that had been knocked to the floor. It showed Emily, Richie and me at Disneyland. Richie’s arm embraced a costumed Mickey Mouse like a huge stuffed animal.

If those meteorites had fallen everywhere like they had here, I doubted Disneyland would be open today.

The house was deathly quiet. My mind produced creatures in every partial shadow—the broom handle protruding from its coffin-like closet became the thin long hand of a werewolf; the open oven, its defective bulb flickering on and off, was transformed into a repository of budding creatures hatching before my eyes.

There was wreckage everywhere. It was as if the thing that had performed it had done it for the sheer evil joy of destruction. I saw no signs of curiosity; no evidence of a search for knowledge. Only destruction. Vases had been broken into small pieces. The prints hanging in the hallway leading to the front of the house had been dashed to the floor, the glass broken, the etchings themselves claw-ripped. The bathroom door, for no apparent reason, had been torn from its hinges.

Warily, I approached the front of the house. Farther down the hallway, more smashed gewgaws, a Picasso poster sliced as if by a razor blade. The telephone table jutted out from its nook at the edge of the living room. The phone lay on the floor beside it. Slipping my carpet knife out, I brandished it before me, edging toward the phone.

I had to pass the entrance to the living room to get at it. I knew this moment would come and had dreaded it. I almost expected the dead body of my wife to be waiting for me at the entrance, her lost limbs restored to her body, her eyes blank, bloody hand upraised…

I passed the entranceway and looked in.

I saw the Christmas tree torn to shreds, the gaping hole in the picture window, the box of ornaments deliberately desecrated, broken delicate shards of glass scattered everywhere—and nothing else. My wife’s body was not there. There was little blood, only a few dried, curiously anemic patches on the rug and walls.

I found that I had been holding my breath. I let it out again.

I went to the hallway and put my hand on the phone. A fantasy entered my mind. This is what would happen: I would call the police and they would come, and they would listen to my story calmly and would even examine minutely the broken part of the house, the burst hinges in the bathroom, the ripped etchings, the broken front window where the thing had imploded into the house, the pale blood stains. They would listen, and then at the end of my story one of them would call for an ambulance. They would tell me the ambulance was for my son. I would weep and thank them. As the ambulance arrived and then men got out of it with a straightjacket to put me in, I would shout, “Wait!” and then beg them to go into the cellar where my son lay tied up as living proof. One cop would look at the other, and then one of them would nod and give me the benefit of the doubt and go look. What the heck, they would think, it was only fair to make sure. But at that moment my son would call out, “Dad?” and appear at the top of the cellar stairs, completely normal, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He would look puzzled when he saw the cops and the funny-farm attendants, and then he would look at me and say innocently, “Dad, what’s going on?”

And then—

I picked up the phone and it was dead.

I checked the wires, and they were connected. I heard a lifeless hiss that stayed no matter what buttons I pushed. I tried the operator; nothing happened. I listened very hard for voices on the line, but I heard nothing but that faint, dull sound.

“Hello?” I said into it. I must have sounded like a desperate man. I must have sounded like a man who wanted his conjured nightmare to come true, who wanted the men in the padded Ford to come and take him to a place where they could shock him into the real world again.

“Hello?” I said. “Hello?”

But this was the real world.

The new real world.

I hung up the phone.

I went to the living room and looked out through the broken front window. The car in the short driveway looked as if it had been demolished; the hood was up, the windows broken, wires and hoses scattered. Beyond the driveway, at the end of the fallow field, the crater still stood. It was empty and strangely dull, an empty hole in gray, empty dirt.

Someone was watching me.

I turned, my carpet knife ready, and saw the square eye of the television staring at me. The cabinet had been cracked, but the set was on, the sound down, formless lines of an unreceived channel filling the screen. The cable box lay next to it, intact.

Please, I whispered.

I ran to the set, nearly tripping over a broken lamp. My hand was trembling as it picked up the cable box and pushed the number for one of the national affiliates, turning up the sound.

There was a click as the button was depressed, and then nothing. The gray mass of formless lines continued.

I cursed, but then I examined the cable box and discovered that one of the wires into the box had been loosened. I fumbled it back into place, praying as I did so.

I stared at the screen, but the picture had not changed.

I pushed a random number, then another. The first produced static, the second a scrambled picture. It was a station we didn’t pay for. I could not see the picture clearly, except to note that it was in black and white. But the sound was crystal clear. “Gee, Mr. Wilson,” a grating young voice was saying, and at that moment I would have paid my entire savings to get “Dennis the Menace” on that station twelve times daily.

Thank God I said to myself, Thank God, but a moment later my hopes were dashed when a button-pushing move across the spectrum of channels produced nothing else.

I went back to “Dennis the Menace” and left the television. I tried the stereo. If there were any signs of normalcy, perhaps I would find them on the radio. The cover had been broken from the turntable, but the receiver worked when I snapped it on. I was met by static. Starting on the extreme left of the dial, I moved slowly through the bandwidth. Loud static, soft static, loud static. Then, I was startled by a station playing “Beautiful Music,” a 1001 Strings version of a Beatles record. I noted the number and moved on. Nothing more until I came to a second station playing music similar to the first. I went on through more static. Then a soft rock station, Billy Joel, Linda Ronstadt. Nothing else.

I went back to the three stations, one after another. They played music. Nothing but music. No time check, no news. I looked at the television screen. Dennis had been replaced by a series of commercials, and then “Gilligan’s Island” came on to the scrambled screen. More commercials. Back to the radio. A few commercials on the soft rock station, followed by more music.

No live voices.

No one alive.

It was obvious the stations I was receiving were on automatic tape or satellite operation. I was ready to accept that there would be some disturbance in the normal course of things since the meteors had landed. But to think that there was no one left broadcasting within a hundred and fifty miles of me a mere day after the beginning of this assault was truly frightening.

I dialed slowly through the radio spectrum, coming across the two automatic stations only and, somewhere toward the right of the dial, what I thought was the very end of a word. I stayed at that spot. When nothing further emerged, I dialed slowly to the right and left of it but heard nothing further. Finally, I turned the stereo off.

Whatever despair I felt was overruled by my stomach, which drove me toward the kitchen.

There were the remains of a meatloaf in the refrigerator, along with a quart of milk. I devoured nearly all of the meatloaf greedily and drank half the milk carton. Then I took out a jar of pickles and a cellophane bag of apples. I ate three apples and one of the pickles, chewing on the last apple as I inventoried the rest of my supplies.

On the dry-foods shelf over the counter were two boxes of cereal and a bag of dried fruit. There were cans of fruit and beans. I remembered with regret that I was to do most of our shopping for the week today, including the grocery shopping for Christmas. There was already a turkey in the freezer that we would have eaten on that day.

I filled a glass with water and sat at the kitchen table. Outside, the shadows had lengthened. The sun was sinking, throwing the grim orange cast it always affected in December. It looked cold.

I had food for three or four days. I had water. The generator in the barn would run for a few days with the fuel I had on hand.

But…what about the rest of the world?

I knew nothing of the rest of the world. But even if I had, I knew that my first priority was my son. I could only hope that the process that had turned him into what he had become would somehow reverse. I would do whatever had to be done.

I took the last of the milk, along with the dried fruit, and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his side away from me, panting. I slid the bowl with the milk toward him with my foot.

“Something to eat,” I said.

He ignored me; when he rolled over it was only to seize the bowl in his mouth and throw it to one side. He growled with anger. He did the same when I put a few pieces of dried fruit down. He continued his struggle to free himself, turning his hateful eyes on me.

“I’ll do what I can, Richie,” I said quietly and went back upstairs.

I stayed up there for the next four hours as it got dark. I kept one lamp on and managed to plug up the hole in the front window with the remains of the Christmas tree and a couple of broken sticks of furniture. There was nothing on the radio, and the television, predictably, showed one rerun after another with nothing but commercials and announcers’ canned comments between.

Finally, a sense of worthlessness overwhelmed me. For a wild moment I thought of going for help. It was obvious I could do nothing for Richie myself. If he didn’t eat, our stalemate would end in a deadly fashion for him anyway.

I had my coat on and was halfway out the door when the howling began. I thought for a horrid moment that one of the creatures had climbed through the hole in the window while I had been in the cellar and was standing behind me. But it was Richie, baying with such intensity that it seemed as though he stood behind me.

I left the stereo on and went back to the cellar. Richie lay on his back, his body arched so that his deformed head was back at a grotesque angle toward one of the cellar windows through which the rising fat Moon shone.

It looked like the white eye of Satan, glaring above the hills. And, like one of Satan’s worshippers, my son paid loud homage to it.

In the near and far distance, I heard other voices, a rising chorus of chilling howls, and I knew that another night was coming, and that I was going nowhere.

In the sky, new meteors began to fall.

I retrieved my hammer, and as best I could, I re-coffined myself against the new night.

CHAPTER 6

The Other

Daylight.

For a moment, I didn’t know where I was. For all I knew, I might have had one beer too many the night before and fallen asleep on the couch in the cellar. Or, perhaps I had fought with Emily and had been banished for my crimes.

But then the world came back to me.

I had survived. That fact alone I found remarkable—that I had made it through a second night trapped in my own cellar. I had even slept a little, toward morning. Most of the night had been filled with the howling and wild thrashings of my son as he sought to break free and obey the command of the Moon above. At one point, he had almost succeeded, but I had managed to tighten his bonds. I looked over at him now; he was rolled into a fetal position. I could hear his shallow breathing. The scattered food that I had left for him had not been touched; milk still pooled along the wall where he had thrown it.

Sunlight streamed through the windows.

I went upstairs. The television was blind now. “Dennis the Menace” had been replaced by static and meaningless lines. Two of the three radio stations were dead; only the soft rock station continued to reel off Melissa Manchester records and Pepsi commercials. I went to the spot where I had thought I heard something the day before, but there was only the sound of Marconian silence.

I left the radio on and went to the kitchen to eat. I filled a bowl with cereal. I was pouring the last of the souring milk onto it when the empty loud static of the radio was replaced by a sudden startling voice.

“Stand by,” the voice said.

I froze with the first spoon of breakfast halfway to my mouth.

The sound of that voice, after two days of silence, galvanized me. But the tone of the voice—it sounded like a professionally calm voice, the kind that state troopers have, but driven to the edge—kept me frozen to the spot. I was afraid that perhaps the following announcement wouldn’t come, that the request to “stand by” was all there would be.

I forgot the cereal and went back to the living room. I stared at the radio as if it was a god. By the clock, five minutes went by. I was beginning to convince myself I had heard the voice in my head when the tone of the static changed, and the voice came back.

“Baines and Proctor,” the voice said, “Baines and Proctor. Apply at once for work.”

The radio went back to static. I stood staring at it, waiting for more. There was nothing.

I had heard from the outside world, and there had been nothing there for me. A voice fighting calm, two names. And then nothing.

I waited, but the radio stayed silent. I finished my breakfast, then wandered around the house. I heard the thing in the cellar grunting against its bonds.

I went into my study, which, I discovered, the beast had passed by. It seemed like another world, one I no longer recognized. Dark green walls, the way I had painted them four years ago when we moved in. Emily had said that that was the way a man’s study should look. Dark colors did that. There was a word processor on a table. There were books in all four corners, on the floor, bulging out of the bookshelves. I had built the bookshelves myself—white pine stained dark mahogany. Thin poetry volumes, four of them mine, occupied a special place above the desk. Theodore Roethke. Robert Frost. My first volume, Solitude. Shelley, Keats, the monolith Milton. Poetry seemed like it was from another world. From the Moon. I knew I had a poem I had been working on in a notebook that occupied center stage on my desk, but at that moment I couldn’t even remember the title. It had, as I recalled, something to do with spring (the opposite of the winter season we were just entering; I often dwelled on that which was not before me, relishing it in memory), something about “the death of roses bloomed.” I could remember nothing more of it.

I believe that art is something pursued in tranquility. A hunted or starving man will have little thought of composition; give the same man a full stomach and safe haven (even if it be Tolstoy’s prison cell) and he will, if so inclined, turn to art. Thoughts of survival have a way of pushing all others aside.

I wondered if I would ever write again.

I left my study, sadly, and found myself at the door to my son’s room.

As I entered Richie’s bedroom, a pang of hurt and loss overcame me. His models, which had been displayed neatly along one side of his desk—two race cars, a spaceship—were smashed to the floor now. Only a Frankenstein monster, as if in mockery, had been left intact. His schoolbooks, which had been stacked, closed tight against Christmas vacation, were scattered around the room. The covers had been pulled from his bed; normally, they would have been turned down, something Emily did every night…

I heard a sound in the hallway.

Startled, I turned to see my son staring at me.

He was crouched slightly, his front paws turned in front of him like a dog standing on its hind legs. His body looked lean and powerful, despite its lack of food. The eyes burned with yellow intensity. There was a near grin on his long, wide mouth.

“Richie?” I said, tentatively.

The lean, bony body tensed, and then he leapt at me. I was standing by my son’s desk chair, and I swung it around in front to block his way. He batted the chair aside.

I moved toward the doorway. He stood breathing shallowly by his desk.

“Richie, please,” I said.

He attacked again.

I swept the contents from the table next to the door in his path and ran. He howled in frustration, leaping from the room and loping after me.

I went to the kitchen, moving behind the kitchen table. He stopped on the other side, panting, regarding me with nothing short of hatred.

“Richie, can’t you hear me?” I pleaded. “My God, there must be part of you left in there.”

He growled like a rabid dog and pushed the kitchen table into me, pinning me against the wall behind.

He threw his head back and howled, then gave a sudden jump and was on the kitchen table on all fours, moving toward me, his jaws opening and closing like a vise.

He jumped and I threw myself under the table, crawling desperately to the far side. The cellar door was open, and I threw myself onto the steps. I tried to push the door closed but he was right behind me and yanked it open. I jumped down the steps, grabbing at one of the pieces I had used to bar the door. At the bottom of the stairs I ran to my workshop and slammed the door shut behind me.

He hit the door with his body, forcing it partway open, but I was able to keep him out.

In a growing rage, he threw himself at the door again and again, but I was able to hold him off.

I refuted all of my earlier complaints about the door, thanking God that this sturdy one was here instead of at the top of the stairs.

He tried for five minutes to get in at me, but I felt his growing weakness, and, finally, he retreated.

I took the opportunity to bang the two-by-four I had brought down with me across the door, and to pull my heavy workbench up against it, and then I settled down to wait.

CHAPTER 7

The Flight

Night fell. The sky outside the windows purpled, then blackened to starlight.

And then the Moon rose.

The thing that had been my son let out a heart-stopping howl as the edge of the Moon lifted up over the lip of Earth.

I watched its pale, evil light fill the world outside my tiny, wire-covered window. It was a horrifyingly beautiful sight. There is beauty in horrible things, in their evil perfection.

Outside the window, I heard other screaming cries, a chorus of prayer to the white-cratered god pulling into Earth’s sky. I thanked the resourcefulness of whoever had built this workshop, providing me with the miniature fortress I now inhabited.

My gratitude proved short-lived. There came a wild howling cry from the other side of the door, and my son threw himself against it, splitting the upper half of the wood. I cried out, “No!” and put my back into the workbench, holding it across the entrance. The thing on the other side clawed and beat at the door, reducing it to splinters.

He stood in the doorway, and I saw what the Moon had done to him. His body had swelled; the muscles in his arms had thickened and hardened; the skin around his eyes had shrunk back to reveal the ferocious, almond orbs of his yellow eyes. The claws on his hands had lengthened and sharpened, one claw at the tip of his finger that had been severed missing.

I moved to the back of the room, where the bench had been. At the cold wall my hand brushed a smooth wooden handle. I clutched at it, expecting to find a dowel or discarded furniture leg, but instead came up with a small ax.

The head was dulled, but I clutched it like it was Excalibur itself.

My son was screaming in blind rage, tearing at the workbench. If he didn’t kill me I would try to disable him.

He thrust his way into the room and I lunged at him, hitting him in the shoulder. It was a glancing blow, the dull ax head sliding aside, but it was enough to bring him up short, and I lifted and brought the ax down again. I felt the blade go into his shoulder this time. He wailed in agony and drew back.

Blood poured from the wound. He turned his head, his mouth gouging wildly at the open slash. His face had lost all traces of intelligence or cunning; his eyes rolled up into their sockets, showing milky yellow. He keened, a sound like the whistling of a high-tension wire.

I advanced on him with the ax, turning the head to the flat side. I meant to break one of his legs or arms if I could, and thereby incapacitate him to the point where I could truss him up again.

He suddenly left off his blood sucking and turned all of his attention back to me.

Time hung suspended; his eyes rolled back down to bright yellow and then he rushed me.

The next moment will live in my memory forever.

I froze; he leaped, as graceful as any ballet dancer; there was a beauty in the way his claws were poised at a precise angle before him to rip my throat and chest out.

I stood unable to move, as hypnotized and resigned as any weaker dog that bares his throat to his victorious enemy.

And then he saved me.

I saw his eyes clear from madness to humanity. It lasted a mere second.” But in that instant he pulled his claws back and turned his mouth aside. I still do not know if he uttered my name, in a guttural wrench of pain, or not. I think he did. But then he slammed into me, knocking me down with the force of his body.

I do know that he said one word, “Go,” as he threw himself away from me, howling in new madness, and then he disappeared through the doorway. I heard him on the stairs, and then he was running through the house, and in another moment his cries were mingled with those of the others of his kind in the Moon’s night.

I lay unmoving for the next five minutes. Though I owned my own life, I felt drained of life. I felt a madman in a nightmare. I believe I lost my mind for a while. The terror of the last few days, the lack of sleep and proper food, the magnitude of my siege, all these combined to bring the animal in my own nature before the man. I recall pacing the length of the cellar, brandishing my tiny weapon and daring any wolf to come near; I remember falling into a slumber at one point, only to visit a world of horrible dreams no better than reality. When I awoke, my madness had only grown. I remember standing at one point with my back against the cold of the cellar wall, the ax blade turned to my own throat, my eyes turned with unreasoning hate to the cold knife-light of the Moon. Why live in a world of madness? I reasoned. Why live in a world that had taken my wife and transformed my son into a monstrous, perverted caricature of all that is considered human? I would remove myself from this nightmare from which I could never wake.

The blade of the ax touched my neck; I recall that distinctly. But I did not draw the blade. Instead I slid down the wall and sat hunched against its cold concrete, crying like a child. I prayed that one of the beasts would wander in and find me then, and accomplish for me what I could not accomplish for myself. With weeping irony, I thought of one of my own lines of poetry: Oh, man, art thou not God in image and deed?

Gods indeed, who could not even ensure their own destruction when preferable to living hell.

Weeping, I again pressed the ax blade to my throat. My eyes wandered to the wire-screened window of the workshop and saw night retreating, day approaching. The howls had stopped—even in madness I had survived the night. No matter, I vowed; tonight would bring another Moon, and for all I knew I was the only man left on an Earth of wolves. I would show them who was God; one deep swipe across my neck—

And then, as if in miracle, the radio upstairs in the living room crackled into life with a single word:

“Attention.”

I went upstairs and listened.

CHAPTER 8

The Voice

By the time I had stumbled to the top of the stairs I was myself again. But the radio was filled with silent static.

I stared at it in disbelief; for a moment madness descended upon me again. I had imagined the voice, I thought. I took the stereo receiver in my two hands, lifted it from its shelf, and prepared to dash it to the floor.

Then the voice returned, startling me, from out of the speakers to either side of me.

“Stand by.”

I gently put the radio down and stood back.

The voice was relieved by static; almost immediately, another voice emerged from the speakers.

He sounded cocksure and tentative at the same time, with the kind of “aw, shucks” persona Gary Cooper often played in the movies—the war hero suddenly pushed in front of a microphone and, consequently, millions of people.

“I don’t really know how to begin,” he said; this was followed by a pause and what sounded like a small hiccup. He resumed, “But here it is. Truth is, we don’t know what’s left. But we do know what’s gone. The President’s dead; so’s the Vice President, Speaker of the House and most of Congress. Most local governments are gone, too, which means the big cities are nothing but chaos. We got all this from Washington, before the last transmitters went there.

“Truth is, I don’t know if anybody’s listening to this or not. I’m betting somebody is. I can’t believe we’re the only organized bunch still getting anything out over the air, but we’ve been sweeping the bands for two days and there’s nothing but a few amateurs left out there. And they’re dropping off one by one, as power goes down or the wolves get ‘em. Seems the fur-faces like to bust up any equipment they can get their hands on. We followed a few shortwave guys in Europe and one from Japan, but they’re quiet now, too. From what we gathered, things are the same all over.”

Again he paused to make that strange hiccup; I could hear him whispering to someone off-mike and then he came back on.

“So here’s where things stand. Far as we know, we’re the only game in town out here. Reason for that, if anybody wants something to lift their spirits, is something that Washington classified as a national security matter—but heck, since Washington doesn’t really exist no more I guess that don’t mean slap. Even so, good American that I am, I ain’t gonna tell you what it is except to say we got a few tricks up our sleeves out here in the desert.

“So the welcome wagon is here. Anybody without fur on his ass who can find Kramer Air Force Base is welcome, and especially, and this is important, so listen up, we need Proctor and Baines, who are out there somewhere, real bad. Anybody comes across ‘em, bring em on in.” He gave a short chuckle and that weird, short hawking sound. “Damn it, Wyatt and Doc, get on in here, we need you to finish these friggin’furballs off and get us straightened out again. Heck, I only got enough chewing tobacco left for another week”—again the hawking sound, a spit of tobacco juice, I now realized—“and you know how mean-tempered I get when I ain’t got my chaw.”

The mike went silent, and I thought the message had ended when the voice erupted again; I heard whispering, then: “They say I forgot to tell you who I am. Don’t see that it makes a difference, except if it’ll get me my chaw, but, heck, this is Lieutenant Jimmy Rogers, United States Air Force.”

This time the radio went out and stayed out; I could hear the release of frequency as their transmitter was turned off, giving the air back to static.

I sat stunned. I hadn’t even noticed that I had sunk into a chair as the broadcast had gone on, so immersed had I been in it. Now the chair held me, mesmerized.

Jimmy Rogers! As if his name didn’t mean anything. The worst they had ever called him was the Chuck Yeager of the eighties, test pilot, space shuttle pilot, the only genuine American hero that everybody agreed on.

Here was Jimmy Rogers, giving me back hope, telling me that he and his boys out at Kramer Air Force Base, a mere 150 miles to the west, were not only holding the wolves off but had a way to beat them!

That was good enough for me.

More than good—it was the only game in town.

CHAPTER 9

Silence

I ate breakfast and then packed. There were cans of food and a canteen of water; whatever dried goods—crackers, the remains of the bag of dried fruit, a partial loaf of moldering bread, a couple of boxes of single-serving cereal, corn flakes and raisin bran (Can’t forget your fiber! I thought with grim humor). Whatever food I could pack into my son’s scout backpack, which was larger than my own hiking pack, I put in. I could discard anything I didn’t need (no littering laws anymore), and the rest, water and food and anything else I might need, I would have to scavenge there.

Then I collected weapons. I took my army knife, a flashlight, and the ax. I checked the shotgun in the living room, but the barrel had been wrenched out of line. I also took waterproof matches, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers.

I decided not to bring a sleeping bag, reasoning that any house along the way would serve the purpose. If things were as bad as Jimmy Rogers claimed, I would have little trouble finding empty beds in empty houses.

At nine o’clock exactly, I pulled open the front door.

It felt immensely strange to perform this simple task. This house had been my prison and fortress—my womb—for two days, and agoraphobia assaulted me. It was safe here, my instinct told me; this is where I had survived. The fact that I had very little chance of continuing to do so meant nothing. My foot froze, not carrying out my commands to step outside.

But I thought of Richie out there somewhere, and the chance I had of saving not only myself but him as well (couldn’t they be working on something at Kramer—something listed under national security—that would turn my son back from beast to man?).

My foot moved; I stepped outside.

Daylight blinded me; I felt like Mole in the Wind in the Willows, meeting sunlight for the first time in spring. It was a beautiful day. It was for days like this that Emily and I had moved here. There was no humidity; the sun would prove hot later, but a step into the shade would banish the heat. The sky was blue, with a depth no city in the United States knows any longer. I had written a poem called “High Blue” that described it like this: Deep pail of sky, the blue bottom of atmosphere.

That was the way that sky looked. This was the kind of day that I always worked well on. I used to plant myself in a chair in the orchard on the other side of the house, and smell the flowers that would soon burst sweet fruit from their middles, and in the ripeness of that atmosphere I would bear poems. I had written all of my book Lone Beginnings there; that had been my first book of poems in my Southwest series, which had been well received and which I loved more than any of my other work.

I had done well here; I thought of why we had moved from the East—the oppression of the cities, the wants and needs and the sheer weight of all those people on the sensibilities were overloading me. I felt that if I did not get away from them they would smother me and, finally, snuff out my will to work. I had colleagues who thrived on the dynamism of New York and Boston; the art and culture did not overwhelm but rather stimulated them to a passion I could not feel. I felt suffocated, and my poems were cramped, stifled things.

But here I had learned to breathe, and as I had breathed so had my work. As the horizon had widened here, so had my own horizon.

But that had been before. I thought of the poem I left on my desk upstairs, which meant so little to me now, and, as numbed and grieved as I felt, I wondered if I would ever write again.

Hiking up my pack, I stepped off the porch.

I checked the car first, knowing what I would find. The distributor cap had been yanked off; it lay in the driveway crushed. For good measure they had ripped the spark plug wires out, along with the battery cables and radiator hoses. All of the windows had been smashed.

Still, fool and romantic that I am, I thought I would try the key in the ignition.

As I reached to open the door on the passenger side I noticed a strange object in the driveway. It was a pile of bones, stark white, which had been shaped into a rough pyramid.

A shiver bolted through me, and I drew back, retrieving my pack, not wanting to think about the pile of bones, giving up my idiotic notion about magically starting the wrecked car.

Now that I knew I would have to walk, I wondered how active the wolves were during the day.

There was a stand of cottonwood trees at the bottom of the driveway. I stayed close to it until I reached the road. An eerie sight met me. There was nothing but dusty emptiness and silence. My mailbox stood knocked at an angle, stuffed with the mail of its final delivery. Some of the contents had spilled to the ground. I stood over them, seeing a familiar creamy envelope. I picked it up and slit it open—and there was an acceptance letter from one of the better poetry journals.

“Thanks, Bill,” I said quietly, looking at the editor’s familiar signature, dropping the letter to the road.

I looked up.

Dust and silence. Our road was the kind you saw in movies where the bus stops in the middle of nowhere to let a single passenger off. The nearest house was nearly a mile away; beyond, there were more houses, and fewer stands of Cottonwood. We lived on the cusp of a changing environment. When I was stationed in Texas in the army I saw the same thing. In Arlington, the trees are plentiful and healthy; by the time you pass Fort Worth the desert is already claiming the foliage. Free of Fort Worth, the desert takes over.

I hitched my pack and headed into the desert.

CHAPTER 10

Death Piece

A quarter mile along Route 20 I saw the first signs of desolation. A tractor-trailer had slammed a brown station wagon from the rear. The semi had tilted and lay like a felled dinosaur, its trailer groaning toward the road but the huge wheels not quite making it.

The station wagon was empty; so was the trailer cab, but the back doors of the trailer were open wide to the sky.

I hoisted myself up onto the bumper and looked down into the gray cavern of the trailer. The most powerful feeling I had ever had in my life washed over me.

I smelled death.

Nausea filled me; I closed my eyes and nearly fell from the bumper, gagging. But I held on, steadied myself and looked into the trailer again. It was empty. There was nothing in there, no puddles of blood, no bodies, to indicate the feeling of carnage I felt.

But, now that I examined the interior more closely, I saw clues that told me that I was right in my feelings.

There were spots around the plywood-lined perimeter of the cabin that had been clawed through. Distinct scratch marks were noticeable; at one point, the metal exterior of the trailer had been reached. And the faint odor of blood was persistent. On closer examination I saw the same sort of pale, dry bloodstains I had seen in my living room.

It was as if an immense slaughter had been undertaken, and then someone had cleaned up antiseptically afterward.

As I jumped down to the tarmac again, filling my lungs with fresh air to wash out the sour dried stench that had filled them, I spotted the remnants of a denim shirt behind the truck. I picked it up and smelled it. Again that faint but unmistakable odor. But no bloodstains. The shirt had been shredded, and as I arranged it on the ground I discovered that whole sections of it were gone.

Something caught my eye from the shallow ditch that bordered the road.

In the ditch was a pile of clothes similar to the shirt. They were worker’s garments, mostly, though there was a young woman’s pair of jeans and a tank top, along with a little girl’s pink dress. All shredded, with pieces missing.

Ten yards up the shallow ditch, the sun glared whitely, and when I reached the source of the glare, my mystery was solved.

I have already described the roughly conical pile of bones I found in my driveway. Here was a miniature pharaoh’s graveyard of them. I counted thirty, and a coldness went through me because I could no longer deny what they were. I found a stick and pushed at the nearest pyramid. It collapsed, bones falling aside to reveal a gleaming human skull beneath, mouth locked open in the final screaming grin we all wear beneath the flesh. There were enough bones, cleaned spotless of meat, to assemble an entire human skeleton.

I could imagine what happened. The truck must have been filled with migrant workers, illegal aliens, possibly, and perhaps it had sideswiped the station wagon the night of the meteor shower. A young mother and her daughter in the station wagon; they get out, the driver gets out, maybe the workers are still in the trailer because they were told to stay in there no matter what. They know what will happen if they are caught.

The meteors fall. The truck driver, probably, investigates, and one of the wolves comes at him. The woman and daughter begin to scream; by now, one of the illegals says the hell with this and opens the back of the truck. The woman and girl get in; maybe they get the door closed but it doesn’t make any difference because one way or another the wolves get in. Maybe it took hours.

Then…

I retched into the sand, dropping my stick into the ditch beside me. I had known all along what the heap of bones in my driveway had been—who they had been—but now, in this killing field, I was faced with it squarely.

I knew now what had happened to my dear Emily; if I had tumbled the pile of bones in our driveway I would no doubt have found her skull. And I had seen the ferocity of my transformed son when blood scented his nostrils.

I vomited the untasted remains of my breakfast, and, long after, I continued to vomit when there was nothing left in my stomach.

I moved away from that place. I covered a half-mile, and when I looked back, the truck, still a fallen dinosaur, was curling down the line of the curving road. I cursed its existence.

I walked on, the sun at mid-morning height now.

CHAPTER 11

The Dying Man

The first house I reached belonged to a man named Briggs. He was my closest neighbor, and though we were not friends he had never refused my company, nor I his, when we had met. His wife had died twenty years ago; he was a retired schoolteacher and he helped orient me when we had first moved in. It was he who had steered me to the right stores, told me who the “crooks” were (I remember he included my landlord in their number after he had wheedled the amount of rent I was paying out of me) and told me where the roads would wash out in spring when the rains came. Though he was a teacher he was not a bookish man, and our interests were incompatible enough that our acquaintance had never blossomed into friendship.

I wondered what had become of him.

I soon found out. His bones were near the porch, piled neatly in a front vegetable garden where he had grown radishes and cucumbers (this was one of the reasons I knew we could never be close: a man who plants radishes in the front of his house just doesn’t care much for the beauty in life). A brown felt hat he had nearly always worn was torn to bits nearby.

A mere thirty yards from Briggs’s home—an oddity in this part of the country since dwellings tended to value their spread—was a house belonging to one of the most interesting, and strangest, men I had ever met.

He was a hermit named Cave. That alone had intrigued me enough about him to want to know more.

The story was that Cave had been a painter of some merit in the 1930s, and that something had happened to him involving a woman, and that he had shut himself up in 1938, vowing to have nothing to do with humanity again. He never left his home; he brandished a weapon at anyone (including myself, the one time I had tried) who came nearer than the front gate. It was said he painted incessantly, screamed in the night, and that most of his paintings were the same portrait of his lost love, done again and again. His food and supplies were delivered once a week by the same clerk from the same grocery store; the bags were left on the porch, the bill always paid by check, left on the porch under a rock.

Briggs, in his gruff way, had been only too happy to clear up some of the romance for me. “It was just before I moved here, 1938,” he told me. “Cave was shacked up with some little piece, and his brother came to visit. The girl left with the brother. Period.”

But for me, Cave was still a romantic figure, a man who had been spurned by the world and so spurned it back. I began to imagine him in there with his paints and his canvases, composing the same portrait of his “little piece” over and over, as madness claimed his mind.

He was the perfect subject for poetry, of course. I had written about him, or rather my idealization of him, in a number of poems:

~ * ~

Man an island,

Soul lost in storm

Surrounded by great weight of land.

~ * ~

I had wanted badly to know Cave, to see his paintings, and here was his house, the gate unlatched, front door open.

I went in.

It was a house similar to Briggs’s, a farmhouse, with just enough room for everything essential and little room for more. I did not see Cave’s remains near the peeling porch of the house; I admit that I did not look very hard.

But I did find Cave’s trespasser-chasing shotgun, leaning just inside the door with an open box of shells next to it, and, as I looked through the house, I found what I fully expected to find, but not what I had wished. Cave was a filthy old recluse; the house was not the self-centered castle of a rejected artist, but the home of a man who had lost touch with civilization. In the kitchen, the sink was brown with stains. Roaches retreated from my steps, and the entire house exuded the odor of garbage and uncleaned toilet. One room was filled with empty cereal boxes stacked in tall, rickety piles. There was barely space to enter. I found no paintings anywhere; no hints in books, or dust-covered supplies, that he had ever been an artist.

There was no attic, but there was a storm cellar. Most of the houses in this area had well-built basements in deference to tornados. Take the toughest, strongest man in this part of the United States and mention the word tornado: fear will rise into his eyes. I once saw a town not twelve miles from my house taken off the map; two twisters, one of them by accounts a white tornado (this is no joke; a white tornado obtains its color from white dust) touched down a quarter mile from the outskirts, did their business, then lifted up a quarter mile outside what had been the town of Parker. Nothing was left standing but a single stone arch from the front entrance of what had been the elementary school. Automobiles had been wrapped like letter C’s around trees. One looked as though it had been put through a car compacter. Tin roofs had been peeled from housetops like banana skins and left in treetops. Telephone poles along the line of the town were bent at the same forty-five-degree angle to the ground. Tractors had been angrily bent and crushed; barns torn to shreds the way a child petulantly treats a paper toy that won’t do as it should. Parker had been dusted from the face of Earth.

It was from the cellar in Cave’s house that I heard him speak.

“Come down,” he growled as I stood in the dark doorway. I knew it was he; it was the same voice that had encouraged me, with more strength, and with the help of his shotgun, to “Get off my property.”

The cellar door was loose on its hinges; a damp moldy smell pushed up from below.

“Are you hurt?” I called.

I was answered by a grating laugh. “You could say that,” he said.

I took my flashlight from my backpack, snapped it on, and aimed it into the cellar.

At the bottom of the stairs was one of his paintings.

So at least some of the stories were true. My romantic images flared up again. I imagined him barricaded in his basement after the wolves came, producing what might be his last testament to the world. There would be a canvas down there, a Guernica filled with werewolves and the scuttling things from the dark corners of his own tortured life.

“I’m coming down,” I said.

I was greeted by damp silence.

I advanced, drawing out my ax. My foot tested each rotting step for strength.

There was a damp, close wall at the bottom of the steps. Against this the painting I had seen rested. The canvas looked old, a study of fruit on a table surrounding a green vase filled with tired daisies. It was not particularly distinguished. It looked like the kind of thing any art student might turn out.

Dusty light filtered in from the cellar windows. At the back of the basement I heard a rattling cough. I advanced deliberately to see a separate room back there, something like my own cellar workshop.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Here,” he answered from the small room. He laughed weakly, breaking into a cough.

I made my way to the doorway.

Another painting rested against a stack of cardboard boxes. It, too, was a still life: apples and a torn loaf of bread arranged on a checkered tablecloth. Completely undistinguished. I began to despair of his talent.

“Coming?” he called.

“Yes,” I said, tentatively.

And then I saw the painting.

It was The Woman. It had to be. A thin, longish face. Serious mouth. The hair, cut in a pageboy style popular in the thirties, emphasized the long, coltish look of the face. The eyes, dark, deep, were knowing, smiling, if wryly, where the mouth was not.

This portrait was just inside the room, propped slightly askew on an easel that had been broken and mended.

The room was crammed with paintings. Another, more surreal version of the woman’s portrait hung on the back wall of the studio, illuminated by a wash of sour yellow sunlight from a dirty basement window. Other frames cut off its lower portion, and canvases nearly blocked the doorway, but the eyes had been enlarged unnaturally and had lost their amusement.

“Come in,” he said.

I stepped through the doorway.

My foot hit something. There on the floor was the body of the wolf he had fought. It was chewed half away. The lower torso was cleaned white bone, the upper fairly intact except for dry gouge marks around the face, and a curiously empty and large wound on the left temple.

“Where are you, Cave?”

“Here.”

He sounded very close. I didn’t see him, but then a hand-like object moved near the back of the room. It looked as though it was covered with a thick black strip of blanket. It was not. What Cave motioned toward me with was his fur-covered front paw.

Brandishing my ax, I moved warily around a stand of blank canvases.

The rest of Cave edged into view.

He was a wolf.

He smiled. It was the smile of a demon held painfully at bay. At any moment, the bright yellow at the edges of his eyes might fill in, sending him from man to animal.

“You’ve fought it,” I said with wonder.

He laughed hollowly. “For a little while.” Each word sounded as though it was battled for. “Don’t worry,” he continued, “I can’t get at you.”

I saw what he meant. He was bound tightly, expertly around the middle and around three of four limbs with wire cable. Only his head and right arm could move. All the roping led back to a thick water pipe behind him.

“It took me the better part of a day to do this,” he said. His slow, bitter laughter came. “I had much encouragement”—he made a movement with his hand, indicating his head—“not to complete the job.”

“It must be horrible,” I said.

“It’s easy,” he said quickly. But I saw the lie in this as his eyes brightened and his breathing quickened; a low guttural sound began in his throat, which he slowly brought under control. After a time his eyes cleared and he regarded me again. “Staying alive is the hard part. Every moment I live I’m afraid of slipping and becoming that thing”—he indicated the dead wolf in the doorway—“again. For even a moment, that would be unbearable.”

His half-mad, half-lucid eyes studied me. “You’re the poet, aren’t you? I knew who you were when you moved in. I’ve read your work.” A bare, distant, fleeting smile crossed his lips. “I remember the day I chased you from my front gate. I even thought of befriending you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Again the fleeting, human smile. “Impossible. I had a reputation to keep. Besides, could I trust you any more than anyone else?”

I saw a different and completely human form of madness hovering around his face; the madness that had kept him alone since 1938.

My eyes were drawn to the paintings surrounding us. Beauty filled that tiny, damp room and demanded to be attended to.

What surprised me was that there were no more portraits of The Woman. The rest were of natural things: odd, weather-twisted trees, waves of tall grass, the objects on a kitchen table made transcendent by the light and shadow and ingenious use of El Greco-like color he brought to their composition. These were nothing like the two works I had seen outside this little room; I could well understand their exclusion.

My eyes were drawn back to the portrait of The Woman on the back wall. I had noticed the difference in the eyes immediately, but now, an examination of the entire portrait revealed the true differences. The second painting made an odd and chilling pair with the one on the easel. The formal beauty of the latter was mirrored in the waxen shapelessness of the former. The woman’s face had been pulled like taffy, the elongation of her features heightened to an unsettling degree, turning coltishness to monstrous animalism, the baring of the twisted soul, an almost—and this was ironic considering the present circumstances—wolfishness.

“Looks a bit like a self-portrait now, doesn’t it?” Cave said. “But I would have thought you of all people could guess the truth about her,” he said, with a guttural laugh that sounded almost mad.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re an incurable romantic, it seems. You wanted to believe the stories. Bart, the grocery clerk, told me everything I ever needed in the way of gossip, you know. And you swallowed what you had heard from Briggs and the rest of them about my lovely Grace.”

He laughed again, a sound like a file across metal, and his hands clenched and unclenched against his bonds. “I threw her out. My brother never touched her. He was a fool, but not that much of one. She was a beautiful but empty woman. I told her to leave in 1938. I was being sucked into her. I would either devote my life to Grace, and her constant happiness, or to my work. She was purely selfish, Blake. She would not let me have both. That was all there was to it.”

Again, Cave studied me. Then he asked, in a curiously soft tone, “I want you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

He pointed to the ax in my hand. “I want you to kill me.”

I must have gasped. “I can’t do that.”

“Two nights ago,” he said, “I was working when the sky lit up. I ignored what was happening. When the lights went out I lit a candle. Sometime before morning the thing in the doorway paid me a visit. I killed it, but not before it had clawed away a good bit of my shoulder.

“I want you to understand what happened to me, Blake. I lay recovering from my wound and a curious thing happened. I felt the oddest sensations of my life.”

His eyes blazed, yellow fire threatening to fill them. “It was as if my head had become twice its size. My mind was clearer than it had ever been. I could smell and see with perfect sharpness. And I had a craving for destruction that I could barely control. I had spent a great many years learning control, Blake. But these feelings were overpowering me.

“And then it did overpower me. I found myself sucking blood from that thing in the doorway. I was becoming something else. Something powerful, and very hungry, and very disdainful of human beings.” His gaze never wavered from me. “They’re not mere animals, Blake. They know what they’re doing. When one of us is bitten, and joins them, he becomes part of their gestalt. They’re going to wipe us out, very quickly, and they know how to do it.” He smiled, a horrible, white-fanged mockery of a human smile. “It’s like Cortez all over again, Blake. Only, we’re the Aztecs.”

His smile disappeared. “Each day it gets worse. You must realize the kind of control it took for me to thrust a woman like Grace from my life, to turn myself away from the world for my art. But I’m not strong enough to fight this. Soon this thing I’ve become will have me. I won’t let that happen to me, Blake. You must kill me.”

“That’s something I just can’t do, Cave,” I said.

He smiled, the most human and friendly gesture he had made yet. “You really are an incurable romantic, Blake.” He continued as if he had thought all this out far in advance. “I assume you would defend yourself.”

Before I could answer, Cave was gone. Yellow filled his eyes like two bright vicious lamps. He thrashed wildly at his bonds; though Cave had set them tight, he apparently had known that if he acquiesced to the thing that fought for control of his being he would be able to break them.

“Cave,” I shouted, “for God’s sake!”

I turned and ran for the stairs.

Near the top, one of the rotted boards gave way, and I nearly tumbled back. It was then I heard Cave break his bonds. A great ruckus arose from the workshop; I heard the sound of tearing canvas. I scrambled upward.

Cave howled as I reached the front door. I heard him bounding up the stairs behind me.

The front screen unaccountably stuck in its jamb. I fought with it, dropping my ax. I turned to see Cave as he stepped into the front hallway. There was no longer anything recognizably human about him; his eyes were filled with blind hatred.

I desperately pushed against the screen. He loped toward me on all fours, remarkably graceful. He leaped. I threw myself to the floor. He crashed over me through the screen door, knocking it and himself out onto the porch.

I fumbled for my ax, my hand finding the stock of Cave’s shotgun as Cave tumbled down the front steps into the sunlight.

His howls were of a different sort now, pained and angry. The light obviously bothered him. He turned his head up and stared into the sun. His eyes mirrored the sun’s color and intensity. Then his eyes locked onto mine. He leaped nimbly onto the porch and then at me.

I pulled the shotgun up, firing both barrels. Most of Cave’s chest exploded in an outward splash of blood and matted fur. He screeched, rolling over me to the floor. He began to lap voraciously at his own blood, thrusting his paws into what had been his chest and then bringing them hungrily to his mouth.

But the wound had been deep. He tried to rise but could not, and as he fell back he turned his head to me.

His eyes were dimming. But suddenly life flowed into them, thrust there by the force of Cave’s will, and he opened his mouth.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

He fell back and, after a moment, was still.

I rose, gathering my ax and Cave’s box of shotgun shells into my pack. Before I moved on, I went back to his cellar, to look at his paintings once more.

CHAPTER 12

The Visitant

Daylight is a precious thing. It was even more precious to me because when I ran out of it I had to be in a place that was safe. When I left Cave’s house it was nearly eleven o’clock in the morning. I headed due west on Route 20, hoping to make Hopkinsville, the nearest town, by five or six.

Sunlight was precious, but, though this was December, it was also hot. I was now in true desert, and besides the occasional rogue cottonwood, live oak, or cool highway overpass (the first of these contained three neat piles of bones, and I spent an anxious few minutes checking every corner of the dark concrete tunnel for unfriendly inhabitants) there was little but open road. We had had late rains this year, and for a while purple sage, along with tiny desert flowers of orange, yellow and blue, kept me company. But even these gave up after I crossed the Valparto River, which, my overpass view confirmed, had turned to two sloping sandy banks sandwiching a trickle of silty water.

At two o’clock I rested in the shade of a roadside barbecue and smoker shack. A thorough inspection revealed one pile of bones and a crater hole only fifteen yards from the smoker. The smoker itself had been torn to bits—whatever had hung in there had been eaten, or destroyed in rage.

I emptied my canteen, refilling it with cold water from an outside pump. There was no canned food. The electricity was dead here, too; opening the refrigerator revealed a three-day-old spoil of brisket and sauce.

The shack was as hot as an oven, so I returned to the relative cool of the shade outside. I ate some of my cereal and drank some water. I estimated I would reach Hopkinsville by five at the latest. Sundown was at six or so. I would have plenty of time.

I topped my canteen from the well water and moved on.

I soon came across another car wreck, involving two flatbeds and two sedans. One of the truck’s headlights still glowed weakly.

No drivers, no bones. I found a Cabbage Patch doll sprawled fatly over the edge of the seat in one of the cars.

By three-thirty I began to curse the sun. What I really cursed was my own stupidity in not bringing suntan lotion. My first priority in Hopkinsville would be to break into a drugstore and supply myself with cold cream.

I wiped my brow with my sleeve and looked out into the desert.

Someone was following me.

There was a figure in the distance to my left. It was veiled in heat haze, about a mile or so away. It crouched when I stopped to look. I stared, and suddenly there was a cactus in pallid bloom where the figure had been.

I wiped my brow again, blinking at the cactus, but it remained a cactus.

I shook my head and walked on.

Almost immediately, I saw the figure again, melting out of the haze and pacing me. This time I kept walking.

I used what astronomers call averted vision, tracking the figure with the periphery of my sight, where the retinas are more sensitive.

If it was a cactus it was a walking cactus. It was following me steadily, at about a half-mile distance.

As I walked, I casually pulled out the shotgun and loaded it, then slipped it loosely back into my pack. The figure did not slow, attempt to edge behind me, or slew toward me. It was content to follow on a parallel course.

I came upon an abandoned school bus, surrounded by piles of blood-licked bones. It was empty, the door eerily open in dead invitation.

I walked; my specter companion walked.

At a little after four-thirty, Hopkinsville rose into hazy view. There was not much to rise; one three-story office building, a couple of gas stations, a small hotel, a few bars and grocery stores, and whatever else a town of seven hundred perched on the desert needs. There was a McDonald’s, of course.

In studying the skyline of the town I had taken my eyes from my silent companion. When I looked for him he had disappeared.

A hard knot tied itself in my stomach. As I walked, I kept my right hand near the stock of the shotgun.

Hopkinsville looked like an abandoned movie set. I walked beneath a string of unlit Christmas lights supporting a tinseled noel sign; every other lamppost sported a cluster of red-ribboned bells, surrounded by circles of bulbs. There was some evidence of chaos; few cars were parked at the curb, most angled into storefronts or telephone poles or each other. There were signs of struggle. Parts of the street were littered with pieces of wood; rolled against one curb was a baseball bat with Jim Rice’s autograph stamped on it. One Custer-like area on the opposite side of the street was peppered with spent rifle shells. A neatly ironic cone of white bones lay near each pile of shells.

As the line of houses and stores enclosed me, my uneasiness grew over the disappearance of my desert companion. Now my averted vision deceived me: a figure crouched on the flat roof of the hardware store turned out to be a corner post anchoring telephone and electrical wires. On the opposite side of the street I saw someone regarding me coyly through the closed drapes of a store window. It was a mannequin dressed to the nines in top hat and tails; a sign next to it said order early! new year’s eve is coming!

I walked on, my right hand hovering over the shotgun.

I passed more bones. I wondered if the population of Hopkinsville could be censused by seven hundred piles of human skeleton.

Halfway up the street was a drugstore. I stopped in front of it. The front door was held open by a doorstop. The druggist must have opened it that last night to let in the cool desert air. The shade of his awning felt good. The interior of the store would feel even better. But I hesitated to go in.

The red burn on my arms and on the back of my neck helped change my mind. I unhitched my shotgun and cautiously entered.

It was dark inside. There were three aisles. I checked them one by one, my heart pounding. At the end of the third I nearly fired into a life-size cardboard cutout of Vanna White. She held a tub of tanning cream.

I went to Vanna White’s aisle and found a good sunscreen and a tube of ointment for sunburn.

I thought fleetingly of leaving money on the counter, remembering all the last-man-on-Earth movies I’ve seen, but good sense overcame cinematic convention and I hurried from the store, shotgun poised. Only outside, safe, under the drugstore awning, did I take a full breath.

I looked up to see the figure that had followed me in the desert regarding me from across the street.

I could not see him clearly. He stood in the porch shadow of a gem store called The Sleeping Lion, and, when I looked up, he retreated into the open door and shut it behind him.

I could not tell if it was man or beast.

I noticed how long the shadows were.

I checked my watch; it was now seven-thirty. The sun would be down in less than an hour. I had sixty minutes to find a safe place, barricade myself in, and wait out the night.

Keeping my eyes on the front of the gem store, I moved up the street. A grocery was ahead. I thought of the meat locker. It would have a good, strong door. It would also have a good, strong odor, but the natural coolness of the enclosure probably would have prevented rotting of the meat stored in there thus far, and I should be able to spend the night in reasonable comfort. It would be easy to defend, and the residual coolness certainly wouldn’t hurt my sunburn.

I stopped in front of the market, waiting unthinking for the automatic doors to open for me. Finally I realized my foolishness and pushed the ungiving door inward. I looked back to the gem store and saw nothing.

It was stuffy inside. The tall front windows gave good illumination, but the back of the store withered into dim shadow. There were ten numbered aisles, including a center-divided frozen-food case that ran from front to rear.

I checked the aisles one by one: bread aisle, canned fruits and vegetables, baking goods, paper products.

The meat case would be in the back, through the swinging white doors.

I started down the beer and soda aisle, picking out a six-pack of Coors and putting it under my arm.

I heard the front doors of the store whisper open behind me.

In front of me, at the end of the dim back of the store, something rushed at me.

I dropped the beer. I dropped the shotgun at the same time. A long, dark sleekness was in the air over me, angling down. It resolved from dim shadow to sharp angles: teeth and red mouth, huge yellow eyes.

Behind me came two loud rapid blasts.

The wolf dropped in front of me.

I turned to discover my rescuer, but he had vanished behind a paper towel display at the front of the aisle. I heard quick steps, another loud gunshot, followed by two more. There was a scream of animal rage. I heard claws running on linoleum, then another shot. Growling segued to agonized rasping, mingled with a tearing sound I knew to be the mindless lapping of blood.

Two gunshots sounded.

There was silence.

I recovered my shotgun and stood. One of the Coors had burst open, fizzing beer against its pack mates. There was a scuffle in the back of the store, a pause, then sounds of pursuit up the front. I stood frozen between the two ends of the aisle, trying to follow the battle with my ears.

“Are you sure it’s loaded?”

I jerked the shotgun toward the form standing at the front of the aisle. It was backlit by the store windows and I couldn’t make out the features.

“It’s loaded,” I said, holding the shotgun steady.

“Know how to use it?”

“I do.”

The form walked slowly toward me. “Sure?”

“Yes.”

He was perhaps a yard and a half from me now, and he thrust his hand out and had my shotgun before I could react. He laughed and gave it back to me stock first. I noticed he held his own rifle loosely in his other hand.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“Emory,” I told him, and he looked at me questioningly. He had a lean face and body, hair cut short. He looked to be forty.

He said, “I know New England when I hear it.”

“My name is Jason Blake. I’m a writer from Connecticut.”

His manner unaccountably softened. “Well, that’s all right,” he said. He reached down to take one of the unopened Coors from the floor, wincing at the warmth as it went down his throat. “I liked the way you followed me with your eyes out there in the desert.” He gestured at the dead wolf at my feet. “You kill any yet?”

I told him about Cave.

He seemed to approve. “Bastard did the right thing.” He measured a short distance between two of his fingers. “I came this close to getting cut by one of them yesterday. Would have done the same thing myself, only not trusted anybody else to do the shooting.” He turned away from me, then abruptly turned back and thrust his hand out for me to shake. His eyes were clear light blue. “I’m Pettis,” he said. “We could use your gun.”

CHAPTER 13

Open House

I followed Pettis out of the supermarket. The sun was perched on the high wire of the horizon. In twenty minutes it would fall into night.

Pettis led me up the block past a dry cleaner’s and the post office, then turned into the small court that fronted the town’s hotel, a picturesque reproduction of an Old West boarding house. Hitching posts curbed the parking spaces, and there were swinging doors into the lobby. Inside, there was lots of varnished Ponderosa pine.

We walked past the abandoned front desk through the dining room. Bubble windows were set in the high-raftered ceiling, shafting dim ovals of twilight onto the polished floor. I held my shotgun up. Pettis seemed unconcerned, swinging his rifle at his side.

At the back of the dining room, we pushed through another swinging door to the kitchen. It was a mess. Pans had been scattered from their shelves. A long knife stood straight out of one wall. The aluminum sinks were scratched and tarnished. A section of the floor was ripped up, linoleum peeled back, floorboards cracked, a new network of nails holding them in place.

“No way that’ll hold,” Pettis said angrily.

Three piles of bones lay next to the sink. Pettis paused to kick one of them, scattering the bones. He went to a battered steel door that looked like it led to the back alley but instead opened onto a short hallway. The hallway ended in another door, this one low and almost square, a solid piece of windowless steel bordered by concrete.

Pettis knocked with the butt end of his rifle on the square door. There was an answering knock. Someone said Pettis’s name, muffled through the door. Pettis answered, “Yes.”

The door opened, revealing a slight, balding man with spectacles that had been mended at the bridge. He looked scared, his rabbit eyes darting from Pettis to me and back to Pettis.

“He’s with us tonight,” Pettis said, and the man, who had been ineffectively blocking the entrance, moved aside. There was a stool set near the hinges of the door and he collapsed onto it. Under the stool was a .38-caliber pistol. The man opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. He began to tremble.

Finally, he blurted out, “How long I gotta stay here, Cowboy?”

Pettis didn’t look at him. “Till the sun goes down.”

The man’s eyes went wide with fear. “You won’t—”

“I won’t leave you here, Cooper,” Pettis snapped. “You’re no goddamn good to me. I’ll send two men up in a little while.” Seeing Cooper’s lips trembling to speak again, Pettis added, “Before the Moon rises.”

As Cooper closed and bolted the door behind us, a look of mild relief filling his frightened features, Pettis turned to me and snorted, “Engineer.”

We walked a narrow hallway that ended abruptly in a steep flight of stairs down. Pettis descended without hesitation. He was a graceful man, his movements catlike.

There was another short hallway at the bottom of the stairs. At the end of it was another door. Pettis banged impatiently on it. It opened immediately to reveal a young girl of twelve or thirteen.

“Didn’t I tell all of you not to open this door without knowing who’s on the other side?” Pettis said sharply.

“I—I heard—”

“Don’t tell me what you heard. That could have been anyone up there talking to Cooper.”

A short woman with dark hair appeared. She put a slim hand on the girl’s shoulder and moved her gently back, confronting Pettis herself.

“I asked Amy to watch while I went to the bathroom,” she said harshly.

“You should have been here yourself,” Pettis answered. “The girl—”

The woman turned and walked away.

Pettis’s face flared in anger. He turned to the door we had passed through, slammed and bolted it.

“Myerson? Biancalata?” he called.

Two young men appeared. One of them had glasses with lenses as thick as a thumb.

Pettis looked at his watch. “In fifteen minutes, the two of you go upstairs with shotguns. Send Cooper down. And by the way, you did a lousy job with the kitchen floor up there.”

“We did what we could.”

“It stinks.”

The two didn’t look pleased as they walked away.

“More engineers,” Pettis said derisively.

“How many people have you got down here?” I asked.

Pettis looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “We had forty to start. Now there’s eleven. With you, twelve.” He began to walk away. “For now.”

I followed him through the narrow entranceway into a large but claustrophobic room. Industrial metal shelving lined one entire wall. The opposite wall held a row of lockers. The center of the room was carpeted with sleeping bags.

Seeing me studying the double row of recessed ceiling lights, Pettis explained, “Battery system.”

In one far corner, a group consisting of another engineer type with a cigarette in his mouth, a young man in a private’s Army uniform, two older women, and an older man who looked startlingly like pictures I’d seen of Robert Oppenheimer, talked over a card game.

Pettis called, “Doc?” and the old man turned his head to regard us with his bird-black eyes.

His accent was English. “What is it, Cowboy?”

“What time tonight?”

“About seven-ten. I should think it will be the worst we’ve seen.”

Doc went back to the game of poker, giving his fan of cards the same rapt attention he had given Pettis’s question.

I must have looked blankly at Pettis, because he said, “Moonrise. Each night, as the Moon waxes, the wolves have been worse.”

I remembered the date, December sixteenth. “Tonight it’s full.”

“That’s right,” he answered, quietly.

Myerson and Biancalata appeared. They were armed, and Pettis brought them upstairs. Cooper scurried down with cries of thankfulness.

I tried to talk to him but he would have nothing to do with me. He went to a corner of the room where he sat turned to the wall, talking to himself.

I walked past the poker game to the small kitchen behind the common room. The woman and the young girl were cooking on an electric range, emptying open cans of chili into a large saucepan.

“Was this place built as a bomb shelter?” I asked.

The woman nodded curtly without looking up. “The owners of the hotel built it in 1962. They thought Kennedy was going to blow the world up. There’s even a morgue built into the back.”

“Biancalata and Myerson didn’t look too happy about taking first watch,” I said.

“That’s because they’ll be dead in an hour,” she answered, tight-lipped. Her knuckles were hard white on the wooden spoon she used on the chili.

“What do you mean?”

She still refused to look at me, staring at the pot of chili in front of her.

“Why doesn’t Pettis just leave the hallway empty upstairs, and guard the door leading into here?”

The young girl spoke up. “Because if someone doesn’t stop them upstairs, they’ll rip the door open here and kill us all. If somebody kills a couple of them upstairs, the rest go for the dead bodies. They go into a feeding frenzy. But last night they killed the men upstairs and almost got in. There were more of them than there were the first night, and they were stronger. Tonight…” She left her thought unsaid, gathering the empty chili cans and carrying them from the kitchen.

The other woman stood tense, her hand gripped tight around her spoon.

Innocently, more out of curiosity than provocation, I asked, “What do you have against Pettis?”

She looked at me then, with the hard icy glare of fear. I thought she would strike me. Her face was splotched red, and tears cornered her eyes.

“Get out!” she sobbed. “Please just get out!”

Embarrassed, I backed out of the kitchen. The young girl brushed past me to hold the woman as she cried.

The card game had broken up. The engineer was shuffling the cards together while four of the others readied the table they had been playing on for dinner. Doc stood alone, tapping an unlit cigarette against his palm. He looked even more like Robert Oppenheimer now; he was tall and thin and slightly stooped, with an air of detachment hovering around him that Oppenheimer’s colleagues had often described.

Pettis returned from upstairs, went to the kitchen and appeared with two bowls of chili for Myerson and Biancalata. When he returned he closed and bolted the door.

The bolt sliding home had a final sound to it, like the last nail in a coffin. There was a palpable, growing tension in the air, the pressure of coming battle. The bomb shelter was like a fort before the next attack, anticipation souring the atmosphere.

The woman and girl appeared in the kitchen doorway with the pot of chili.

“Dinner,” the woman called, tonelessly.

It was a cheerless meal, with little conversation. The card playing engineer, named Rhodes, chided the Army private about his poker strategy; the private smiled distractedly and studied his chili bowl. Doc ate as if he wouldn’t have noticed if he had been served dog food. The two older women, who reminded me of nuns out of habit, stared at the table, intent on not drawing attention to themselves.

I ate as much as I could. To me, the meal, the first hot nourishment I had had in three days, was anything but dog food. When the young girl produced a plate of

Oreo cookies for dessert, along with Styrofoam cups filled with hot coffee, I nearly cried with pleasure. A week ago, this meal in this place would have seemed hell; this night, it was paradise.

But the tension in the room was rising. Finishing my second cup of coffee, I looked at my watch. It was nearly seven o’clock. The rest didn’t seem to need a watch. Brittle silence was broken now and again by the engineer’s coughing; after the fit passed he would light another cigarette, pulling one from a pack in his pocket, then discarding the pack to take another from the half-full carton next to him. I hadn’t seen him without a cigarette since the poker game.

At seven o’clock Pettis looked at Doc, who nodded. Everyone got up, retrieved weapons from the lockers against the wall, and retired to various spots in the room. Even the young girl had a handgun.

Pettis unbolted the shelter door. Two empty chili bowls were there. With his boot he kicked them into the room.

“Anything up there?” he called to Biancalata and Myerson.

Somewhere far off, I heard a howl, then another.

Myerson’s deep voice answered, nervously, “It’s starting.”

Pettis turned to me. “Lock it behind me. I yell, open it quick.”

Doc ambled over to look into the darkened hallway leading to the steps upstairs. He had a cigarette of his own dangling from his fingers. He wore a seriously bemused look. He looked at me as if I was something worth studying.

“He trusts you,” Doc said, smiling slightly.

“That surprises you?”

“He doesn’t trust anybody.”

I locked and checked the bolts on the door. “Does anybody trust him?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” He paused to lift his cigarette lazily to his mouth, then drop his hand again. “He’s been up there every night; saved Wilkins over there,” he gestured toward the chain-smoking engineer by brushing his hand in the man’s direction, “two nights ago. Without Pettis I doubt any of us would be alive.”

Up above, beyond all the doors, in the night, I heard a clique of closer, hungrier howls.

“The young woman with the girl doesn’t seem to think much of him.”

Doc regarded me; his eyes were gray, clear, and even. “You mean Moira. I wouldn’t count on your assessment.”

“Why not?”

“She’s his wife. The girl is his daughter.”

A great noise sounded above us. Wilkins shouted, “They’re going to try from above!”

The staccato of random noise became an avalanche. Up the stairs, outside our door, howls of rage mixed with the sounds of metal striking metal. I pressed my ear to the door, straining to hear Pettis’s voice should it come.

Doc said, “There are at least a hundred of them up there now.” A particularly gruesome wail tore through the air, directly above our heads. Doc added, looking at the ceiling, “Perhaps more.”

Doc moved to an empty spot between the Army private and the two older women, who huddled weaponless in the corner by the lockers.

From above came the sound of ripping metal, followed by three gun blasts. I heard a scream. Two more shotgun blasts ensued; then I heard Pettis’s voice.

“Open it!”

I slid the bolts aside and it was thrown open. Pettis bulled his way in, dragging Myerson behind him. The left side of Myerson’s body was covered with blood. There were rake marks down his shoulder across his ribs to his belt, which had been sliced in half.

“Close it!” Pettis screamed.

I pushed the door closed and knocked the bolts into place. The others were dragging whatever wasn’t tied down toward the door. I stepped aside as a metal locker (dragged by the two older women, who had shaken themselves from their stupor), the wooden bench that had lined one wall, even the chairs we had sat on to eat our dinner, were piled up. Over these, the sleeping bags were thrown.

It was clear from the ferocious wails of hunger emanating from the other side of the door what had happened to Biancalata.

They dragged Myerson to the back end of the room near the kitchen. Pettis bent over him, ripping Myerson’s clothing, minutely examining the wounds.

Doc shook his head. Pettis held him off. “The first one in got him,” he said. “Raked him up with a garden tool.” He continued to examine Myerson, ignoring the man’s cries. “I just don’t know if it got at him with the claws or not.”

“Can we take the chance?” Doc asked reasonably.

Pettis paused. “Yes, damn it.”

Pettis wiped his bloody hands on his pants. Wilkins and Cooper stood nearby. “Put him in the kitchen,” Pettis ordered. “Bandage the wound. And then tie him up tight.” He eyed the engineers closely.

Wilkins, a cigarette still in his mouth, nodded, and he and Cooper took Myerson away.

Doc stared at the barricaded door, behind which the screams of wolves battling over blood had diminished somewhat. “It won’t be long.”

Pettis looked at the ceiling. “Have they tried to get through that patch-up?” he asked.

“No,” Doc replied.

And then there came a sound that made everyone in the room, even Pettis, stop what they were doing and listen in awe and fear.

I must try to describe this sound. It was a single keen, transformed into a choir, mounting in killing lust until the chorus became a single, numbing shriek of devotion and madness. It was the kind of sound the earth itself might make when opening up to release Satan from hell.

“My God,” said Wilkins.

“The full Moon,” Doc whispered, staring at his watch to see that it was, indeed, seven-ten, his predicted time of arrival.

I could imagine it out there, rising over the edge of Earth—the Moon, Luna, Selene, who now sought mastery of her father planet. She was in triumph tonight; even now, new meteors would be spitting down from her face to secure conquest. I wondered if the Earth was to become the Moon herself, trading spiritual place with her parent. The Oedipus complex had come to planetary physics, with the transference of souls from a dead white world to a wet living one.

The two old women were back in their lockerless corner, cowering. Pettis, Doc, and the others, myself included, stared up at the source of those horrible primal sounds, as if the ceiling had melted away, giving us the same cold view of the Moon the wolves enjoyed.

“Jesus,” Pettis said, and I saw him trade a look with his wife. “Jesus.”

Myerson moaned from the kitchen.

That broke the spell. Pettis checked all firearms. “They’re going to come in fast,” he announced.

They came in fast. The roaring became a cacophony of mindless screams. The first assault struck the door. There was a loud tearing noise but the bolts held. One of the sleeping bags slid slowly from its perch atop the pile; as it folded to the floor, the second charge came. This time the barricade shuddered. On the third attack I heard the unmistakable groan of metal giving way.

A chorus of shouts went up behind me. I heard a howl so close and full-throated that every hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up.

Someone shouted behind me. I took my eyes from the barricaded door. There in the doorway of the kitchen was a blank shape that resolved into a wolf, mouth open, eyes burning.

“It’s Myerson!” Wilkins shouted.

The Army private, who was standing just outside the kitchen, screamed. Instead of firing his .44, he froze and stared up into the wolf’s face.

Myerson lowered his head and took the private’s shoulder into it, raking his claws across the young man’s chest. Blood spurted everywhere at once.

The private screamed, then went limp.

Myerson shrieked and fell upon the dead body, slashing it to bits with the razors of his teeth and claws. He licked at every drop of blood, shredding clothes like crepe paper, devouring entrails, muscle, and tissue. The man’s exposed rib cage was cleaned dry. I watched in sickened fascination.

“Enough,” Pettis said. He raised his rifle to fire but then jerked it higher and shot at something behind Myerson, a wolf shape just emerging from the kitchen.

The wolf fell but another appeared behind it. Yellow eyes wide with rage and lust, it fell on the new corpse, tearing at it with its teeth.

“Jesus, they dug into the kitchen!” Wilkins shouted. Another dark shape dropped down into the small room.

A fusillade of gunfire erupted into the doorway of the kitchen. Backing into the barricade of cabinets and furniture, I fired twice, pausing to reload. When the smoke cleared, three dead beasts, Myerson among them, were piled near the kitchen opening. Another wolf had dropped into the kitchen and was already going for the bodies.

I felt the barricade move toward me. The door was being pushed inward.

Someone stumbled in my path, moving toward the kitchen. It was one of the old women. “Rebecca? Rebecca?” she called. I tried to grab her but she screamed when I touched her and stumbled away. A moment later I saw one of the wolves cover her like a cloak and she went down. I saw her friend nearby, a wolf pulling bloodily at her lifeless back.

The pile of furniture heaved behind me, greeted by a bray of victory from the partially open doorway. I was being pushed to the center of the room. I loaded my shotgun and fired twice, dropping one wolf that had clawed its way out of the kitchen.

Someone pulled me down as a wolf leaped from the pile of chairs and lockers covering the door. It was Pettis. He shot the thing as it landed.

“Come with me,” Pettis said, clutching my arm.

I followed. The room was dense with smoke and the smell of carnage. He pulled me toward the far corner, adjacent to where the line of lockers had been. Behind us, I heard a tremendous crash as the last of the barricade was breached.

“Get in,” he said.

I saw nothing, what looked like blank wall. The roar and stink of death behind me grew louder—

He shoved me and I hit what should have been the wall, but it suddenly opened and I kept going. I felt like Alice, tumbling through the mirror into the looking glass world. I saw blank faces staring at me. Then there was darkness; my head was forced down by a low ceiling. Someone cursed at me under his breath.

“Sit,” I was ordered.

I squatted. Someone was directly under me. Impatient hands moved me to one side and I sat. Cold metal met my back. I reached up; I could just touch the ceiling from a sitting position, making it a scant four feet above me. I touched gingerly out to my right; there was a warm body a few inches from me, not as tall as I. Over its head I felt the wall, very close. On the other side was the person who had sat me down. I imagined the wall was close to whoever it was. Maybe four feet wide. Six feet long. I thanked God I wasn’t a claustrophobic.

“Anyone else left?” the body to my left whispered in a hoarse British accent; it sounded like Doc.

The one to my right, a young voice—the girl Amy—whimpered in reply.

“Don’t worry,” Doc said, reaching over me to touch the girl. “He’ll find her.”

The sounds of battle raging outside were greatly muffled.

“Doc?” I ventured. The body to my right told me in a fierce whisper, “Quiet.”

There was a grating noise and then blinding light in front of me. I smelled blood. The light was blocked by someone crouching. A figure fell onto me and darkness returned. I felt wetness on my arm. I sucked in my breath in sudden fear, but Pettis’s voice said calmly, “She wasn’t bitten.”

“Where the hell are we?” I asked.

“In the morgue they built into the shelter. The door is solid steel. The wolves don’t know it’s here. I suggest we don’t talk. Whatever air we have now is what we have until morning.”

“Cowboy,” Doc’s low, patient accent came from beside me, “are you sure they won’t smell Moira’s blood?”

There was a pause. “There’s enough out there to keep them busy all night.”

“Are you quite sure she wasn’t bitten?” Doc had softened his voice, but it still sounded clinical and cold.

There was a longer pause. The girl’s hand passed over me to stroke her mother’s face, which lay in my lap.

“It’s all right, Cowboy,” Doc said. The clinical tone had bled away. “I assume the others are dead?”

“Yes. No more talk,” Pettis answered.

Intimately close, each alone with his thoughts and nightmares, with the sounds of distant, muffled death filtering into our steel tomb, we waited.

CHAPTER 14

Elegy

We waited forever.

In our morgue, we breathed shallowly. My own lungs settled into a rhythm that, after a time, became my sole attention. My head grew light, but still I puffed in, puffed out, like an emphysemic.

At one point, I drifted into sleep, and dreamed. In the dream my son and wife beckoned me from the doorway of our house. I was walking up the steps, toward them, and behind them, in the house, I heard what sounded like the television on, very loud. It was Jimmy Rogers’s voice, shouting in his confident drawl, “We need Proctor and Baines real bad. Proctor and Baines.” I heard him spit, and then the television got very loud and then very soft, and I distinctly heard the click of it being shut off. My wife and son stopped smiling. I had nearly reached them. Their smiles returned, only they weren’t smiles anymore. Their mouths were filled with long teeth, and their faces became indistinct, pushed out, longer. As I reached to embrace them they took me and began to tear at my flesh with their teeth and hands…

The dream ended, and I became aware of my breathing again. In, out. In, out. Only now, the puffing was ineffective; I needed more air. I felt like a drowning man reaching for a receding surface.

Shallow breathing was turning to gasping around me. Pettis’s daughter labored for breath; Doc, whose lungs must have been filled with years of nicotine stains, was doing no better.

“What…time is it?” Doc gasped.

A round smudge of fluorescence glowed into life directly in front of me; in its light I made out Pettis’s features greenly. He let go of the button on his watch and the green light disappeared.

“Four-sixteen.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Don’t talk,” Pettis ordered.

We gasped on. I began to hallucinate, dreaming awake. I saw wolf faces floating before me, mouths snapping like steel traps, howling, laughing…

Finally, at five o’clock, Pettis announced, “I’m…going to open the door for a minute.”

“Yes,” Doc begged.

Pettis shifted in the dark, grunting. A long vertical crack of light suddenly beamed into the room. Sound flooded in—something snarled in the distance.

Pettis grunted again; the crack doubled in width, doubled once more.

There was now a one-inch line of the bomb shelter visible. I saw nothing but bright light that hurt my eyes, something dark in the distance that looked like the top of a locker.

Cool air brushed my face.

I felt as if someone had given me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A luxurious breath of oxygen climbed down my throat; my lungs screamed Yes! Yes!, pushing sour carbon dioxide out.

“Oh, God!”Pettis’s daughter suddenly cried.

For a long time, in the coffin-like quarters we occupied, with the lack of fresh air, the nearness of human bodies, the cramping of my body, I had been unaware of the weight of Pettis’s wife on my lap. Her head had been cradled there, and she had not moved at all, except to cough once, soon after Pettis had sealed the door. I now put my hand to her face and felt coldness.

“She’s dead,” Amy Pettis wailed.

Doc’s hand went to her throat, seeking pulse. “Yes,” he said.

Pettis was silent. When he spoke he only said, “I have to close the door.”

Pettis shifted again, and the door began to close.

It stopped. Pettis cursed. There was a loud sound right outside our prison, and the door flew back, flooding us with blinding light. Shielding my eyes, I saw moving shapes, broken furniture—and a hulking figure that stood directly in front of us, screaming in rage, reaching in to pluck us like rabbits from a cage—

Pettis pulled the body of his wife to the opening and pushed it out of the bomb shelter.

“No!” his daughter screamed.

The thing outside wailed. The body was yanked savagely from Pettis’s hands. I saw the glow of the wolf’s yellow eyes, a patch of dried blood on the woman’s forehead, the cold blue gleam of her dead limbs, and then heard the terrible tearing sound of the wolf feeding.

Pettis jammed the door closed. His rapid breath, which he fought to bring under control, was mixed with the hitching sobs of his daughter.

“How…could…you…do…that!”

Doc tried to calm her, but she grew hysterical, lashing out over me to try to hit her father with her fists.

“How…could…you…”

Pettis leaned over me. I thought he was going to take her in his arms but instead he brought her face close to his and covered her mouth with his hand.

“If you’re not quiet, they’ll kill us all.”

Her sobs quieted. He let her go, and she fell back with a gasp. When Pettis pushed the button on his watch to check the time I saw her pull up into a ball, hands tightly around her knees, face turned to the wall.

“It’s five twenty-two,” Pettis announced. “If they leave us alone for thirty-four minutes we’re safe.”

For the next half hour we listened to the horrible sounds just beyond our door. More than one wolf had joined in the feed, and we all knew that when they were finished with Moira Pettis they would come after us.

For twenty minutes we were left alone. Then a crack of light appeared in the door.

Pettis threw himself against it, trying to hold it closed. Screams of protest and rage rose on the other side. Doc and I moved to help. The three of us raked our fingernails against the cold steel, trying to hold it in place.

The door was pulled open another half inch, A long sharp claw curled into the opening. The muscles in my arms were about to burst out of my skin.

“No, you bastards!” Pettis shouted, but the pressure was too great and the three of us were thrown back as the door flew open. A hulking brown shape filled the doorway, eyes wide with fire.

There was a deafening shot. The wolf threw its paws to its head. One of its yellow eyes burst, a flow of blood spattering us. There was another shot. I turned to see Pettis’s daughter aiming her .45 a third time as the beast collapsed in front of us, blocking the door. We pushed it out of the way as three other wolves fell on their dead, unmourned comrade.

And then there came a sudden change in the air. One of the wolves crouched back on its heels and sniffed. The other two paused in their feeding. They went back to their work, tearing huge chunks of meat from the corpse, the crude beginnings of a pyramid of white bones beginning beside them.

Again they became tentative. In our cramped space, Pettis and I added our own firepower to Amy’s, and two of the wolves went down. The remaining beast backed away, snarling with indecision, then turned and loped away.

Pettis looked at his watch.

“The Moon’s set,” he announced.

“Thank God,” Doc said weakly, his face ashen.

Pettis left our prison first. He checked the corners of the room. The barricade had been hurled aside, leaving a clear path to the doorway. He walked to the kitchen to check the hole in the ceiling.

“All clear,” he called.

I stumbled out, and behind me, Doc crawled out on all fours, stretching himself slowly up to full height, holding his back.

Amy had sat curled in her corner of the morgue, crying.

The floor was littered with stacks of bones. Moira’s skeleton, partially assembled, the skull fatefully left at the top of the ribcage, empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling, mouth pulled open in the scream of the dead, was one of perhaps fifty. Some were separated into neat pyramidal piles, others in haste had been left like the girl’s mother.

Pettis returned from the kitchen. His eyes rested on the remains of his wife. His face went blank. He crouched in front of the morgue opening.

“Come on, Amy,” he said, gently.

She sat unmoved, face away from him. He moved to go to her. Suddenly she struck out at him, scratching at him with her fingernails.

“You bastard!” she screamed. “Look what they did to her!” She pushed him back, out of the morgue, forcing his head down toward his dead wife’s staring, unseeing skull.

He let her do what she wanted. He stared into the skull’s eyes, then he stood and held Amy firmly against him.

She fought him, beating with her fists and crying. Then she collapsed, her arms going around him and holding him, her face buried against him.

“Oh, God, Daddy. Oh, God…”

“It’s all right, baby,” he soothed, stroking her hair. “It’s all right.”

“No it’s not!” She pulled her face away and looked up at him. “It’s never going to be all right! You knew what she was afraid of! You knew she wanted things just to stay like they were, with you and her and me! I know she was wrong—but do you know how scared she was that you would get killed helping all these other people?”

“I know, baby. I know.”

His daughter grew fierce. “Maybe she was right! Maybe we should have gone away together like she said, just the three of us, safe—oh, God…”

He pulled her head against him again, brushing at her hair. “It’s okay, baby,” he said. His gaze lifted to Doc, then to me. “It’s okay.”

His daughter continued to cry in the new morning, and all of us wondered if he was lying to her.

CHAPTER 15

Orders for the Day

We spent the morning clearing out wreckage in our bomb shelter. Except for Moira’s remains, which we buried, we swept the bones into a gruesome pile and carted them out to an alley behind the hotel. After clearing out the rest of the wreckage, we were left surveying what was left of our fortress.

“I wonder if we should bother,” Pettis said around noon, as we rested with warm Cokes from the hotel’s machine, which the wolves had partially destroyed and which we took great pleasure in breaking open. “Every night those bastards have done a worse job on this place than the night before. The doors I can fix again, and we can patch up the hole over the kitchen, but I don’t think we can stand another night like last night. They know we’re here, now they know about the morgue. I think we should move elsewhere.”

“You said yourself there’s no other place in Hopkinsville as defendable as this,” Doc stated.

“There’s the bank vault,” Pettis replied. “With only the four of us, air’s no problem. There’s no way they could get in.”

As they discussed our plight I sat on the floor with my head against the wall. My mind wandered. I was very tired. Suddenly I was drifting off to sleep. I saw my wife and son again, standing on the porch of our house; they began to smile the smile of wolves, and behind them on the radio Jimmy Rogers’s voice drawled, “We need Proctor and Baines, we need Proctor and Baines, damn it, Wyatt and Doc, get on in here—”

I sat up. The Coke I was holding spilled. I blinked the real world back into my eyes.

“Doc, is your name Baines?” I asked.

He looked at me dispassionately. “Why, yes.”

“Do you know someone named Wyatt Proctor?”

He and Pettis looked at one another. “Of course.”

I told him about Jimmy Rogers and the radio.

“That crazy jackass,” Pettis said, brightening.

“Mr. Blake,” Doc said, “I don’t think you realize the service you’ve just performed.”

“We’ve been waiting to hear from Rogers for two days,” Pettis explained. “They were supposed to send a helicopter to take us to Edwards Air Force Base. That was the last we heard from them before the phones and power went dead. I spent the whole first day looking for a radio that worked. Every single one had been broken to bits. I was out in the desert looking for the chopper when I spotted you yesterday.”

Doc and Cowboy exchanged thoughtful looks.

“You think Rogers got things set up at Kramer?” Doc asked.

“Hell, I wouldn’t put anything past Jimmy. Edwards must have been overrun. He may have lost his copter, but—Jeez,” he said, smiling with new purpose, “we’ve got work to do.”

It took the rest of the day to do it. We ate, then Doc and Amy got together everything we would need from the hotel while Pettis and I went shopping for the rest.

The street in front of the hotel was brilliantly lit with sunlight. I began to walk boldly out into it when Pettis took my arm. “There,” he said. Across the street, in the shadow between two buildings, was the crouched figure of a wolf.

Pettis raised his rifle. The beast retreated warily into the alley.

“It’s the full Moon,” Pettis said. “They’re getting bolder during the day.”

We proceeded with caution. We went first to the hardware store. While I stood guard out front, Pettis entered the gun room. After an interminable time, he let out a whoop of triumph and emerged with two shotguns, boxes of ammo, and what looked like an Uzi.

“I knew the bastard had one of these,” he said, holding the machine gun up. “He was with us in the bomb shelter the first night and kept talking about it. But he wouldn’t tell me where it was. Stupid son of a bitch was more worried about having an illegal firearm than he was about staying alive. It was in a false bottom in his desk.”

At the front of the store we gathered some tools, flashlights, and batteries. We also took a long length of plastic hose. Without explanation, Pettis took a few packets of flower seeds. Next we went to the supermarket where we had met the day before. We loaded everything from the hardware store into a cart and rolled to the door. Pettis checked the clip on the Uzi.

“Wait here,” he said, going in.

Through the front windows I saw him go down the dairy aisle and move back toward me up the next. I saw movement above him, up on the top shelf. He crouched and whirled. A staccato burst of fire leapt from the Uzi. A small torsoed wolf fell dead in front of him. He went on. I heard another burst of gunfire at the back of the store before he reappeared, signaling me in.

We loaded the cart with cans and boxes. For a few moments I allowed myself to become a child again, on a shopping spree. There was a perverse sense of delight in taking whatever we wished, and I indulged myself in boxes of cookies and packages of candy bars. By the time we had finished, the cart was nearly spilling over. We threw some unspoiled fruit into it before rolling it out onto the street.

We pushed the cart toward the outskirts of town. Just before Hopkinsville melted into desert we left the cart and turned down a narrow alley between two houses. On the right, about halfway down the alley, we passed a second-floor patio. The door leading to the patio was ajar. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door move. I turned and fired at it.

Pettis was down on the ground before the echo of my shot had faded. He got up cautiously, then studied the door, swinging untouched in the breeze. My shotgun blast formed a neat scatter of pellet holes in the stucco a foot above it.

“You’re a lousy shot,” he grinned. “Sure you’re not an engineer?”

“What have you got against engineers?”

He continued to smile. “You know what they say: It takes an engineer to build the Brooklyn Bridge, and he’s the first guy you can sell it to.”

His smile disappeared when we reached the end of the alley. The small structure there looked nothing like the garage it was. Its brown stucco exterior was fronted with neat flower boxes under curtained windows, its red-tiled roof ledged in white gingerbread trim. Only the double doors at one end gave it away.

There were holes in the double doors, some of the tiles had been broken and knocked from the roof, and most of the windowpanes had been broken. Glass shards were scattered over a once neatly trimmed lawn.

“Hell,” Pettis muttered. He produced a key for the garage doors, pulled them open, and disappeared inside.

“Goddamn.”

He bent over the dented open hood of a small van. It had at one time been meticulously cared for; the chrome on the bumpers shone like new, the cherry red finish bright with wax where it wasn’t dented or scratched.

On the floor were tools—screwdrivers, the scattered remains of a wrench set, a meter with its face cracked. Pettis kicked at a nearby hex driver, cursing again.

“I hoped they wouldn’t get at it,” he said. “I thought it was well enough hidden. I really thought—” He kicked at the van, anger flaring.

He picked up a rag, then threw it down on top of the air filter cover. “Let’s see what I can do,” he said, resignedly. His head disappeared under the hood.

I went to the doorway and watched the alley. My gaze kept drifting back to the second-story porch with its swinging door. But only the slight breeze moved it as I watched.

Pettis banged around in the garage for a half hour before he called me.

“Don’t ask me why, but we’re in luck,” he smiled. “Every car I’ve looked at had hoses and tires slashed, distributor caps cracked, carburetors mangled. The only thing wrong with this was that the spark plug wires were pulled. Everything else is fine.”

“You mean it’ll work?”

“Get in back and I’ll start it up.”

I went to the rear and turned the latch on the door. Hair rose on the back of my neck. The door flew open to reveal a snarling wolf.

I heard the rapping tattoo of Pettis’s Uzi, and the wolf cried out once and fell beside me.

Pettis looked at me. “Now we know why the car wasn’t trashed. We caught him in the middle of it.”

“Guess that still makes us lucky.”

“Or stupid. Get in.”

I climbed into the back of the van, and Pettis turned over the ignition.

The engine roared into life. Pettis whooped and edged the van slowly out of the garage and down the alley. Suddenly he stopped the car and jumped out, holding the Uzi up.

“Forgot something,” he said.

He returned to the garage, emerging with something under his arm. He climbed into the driver’s seat and turned around, handing a book to me.

“When this is all over,” he said, “I want you to sign it.”

It was a copy of my first volume of poetry, Solitude.

For the first time since I had met him the day before, he was not completely sure of himself. “I read that when it came out,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.”

Seeing Pettis’s self-consciousness made me uneasy. It always embarrassed me to find people treating me this way. I’m a man who writes poetry, but I’m also a man who shops at supermarkets and pays bills and hates broccoli. I don’t know the secrets of God. I don’t know more than the next man. I have the same fears and epiphanies as anyone else. I just know how to write about it, and that seems, perversely, to make me special to other people. I hate that. Whatever success I’ve had merely means that I’m a lot like everyone else, since many of them seem to understand what I’m saying.

“It meant a lot to me when I wrote it,” I said. “When all this is over, I’ll sign it for you.”

We left the alley. The windows in the back of the van were covered by curtains. I drew them back to see something with yellow eyes glaring down at us from the porch of the house we had passed coming in. The eyes retreated, and this time when the porch door swung, it closed.

Pettis braked at the mouth of the alley, and we loaded the contents of the grocery cart into the van. I watched for the reappearance of our monitor. When I told Pettis about it he grunted.

“Guess you’re not an engineer after all. That’s the second time I’ve been stupid today. They’ll all know we’re trying to leave now.”

He left me at the van and climbed a trellis to the second-floor porch. I saw him open the door and enter the house, then heard nothing. When Pettis returned, by way of the front door, he was grim.

“We’d better get gas and get back to the hotel,” he said.

We got back in the van, and Pettis threw it into gear and roared off.

There was an Exxon station two blocks away, and Pettis pulled in and killed the engine. The silence was eerie. The pumps had been smashed, but they wouldn’t have worked without electricity anyway, so we siphoned gas directly out of the underground tanks with the plastic hose from the hardware store. Pettis got two covers off, one for the van and another for the two five-gallon containers in the back of the van.

As we were rolling up the siphons to leave, Pettis glanced up to check the sun, which had begun to lower toward the desert.

“I wanted to get out of here earlier,” he said, shaking his head.

We loaded up and pulled out.

While Pettis drove, I turned to the title poem in my book. I began:

In solitude born, we live and perish. In solitude, lone spirits encased In borrowed dust.

That seemed truer now than it had to the lonely young man who had written it twenty years before.

At the hotel they were as ready as they were going to be. Amy was pacing nervously outside the front door, her .45 weighting her right hand. Her eyes went wide when she saw the van.

“Doc, come here!” she called into the lobby excitedly.

Pettis got out, slamming the door. “Any trouble while we were gone?”

“One stopped at the end of the courtyard a little while ago. It ran away when I shot at it.”

Doc appeared at the swinging doors. His solemn face brightened when he spied the van. “Ah.”

“Don’t be too pleased,” Pettis said. “They know just what we’re doing.”

Doc said, “We’ve got two hours of daylight, and another half hour beyond that before the Moon comes up. With any luck—”

“Forget luck,” Pettis said. “After the full Moon last night, they’re pretty active today. I’d expect trouble no matter when we leave.”

As if in answer, a hulking shape appeared in the mouth of the alley across the street. It regarded us bale-fully, and when Pettis sent a volley of machine-gun fire at it, it merely retreated into the gloom.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Pettis said.

CHAPTER 16

Transplanting

The sun left us. It had grown old and dark and tired, and now, when we needed its strength and good heat, it died into the west.

A lazy bank of clouds crawled across the western horizon, sealing the coffin of the sun, turning the long twilight even darker.

Out of this twilight, between us and the dead sun, the wolves appeared.

Perhaps they smelled the Moon slowly climbing the ladder in the east. Perhaps their hatred for us, now only four of the seven hundred human beings who had once inhabited the town of Hopkinsville, was so intense, so all-consuming, that they were compelled to destroy us no matter what. All I know is that as we roared up Hopkinsville’s main street on our way out of town, an indistinct mass in front of us in the gloomy twilight focused, in the high beams of the van’s headlights, into a wall of wolves.

Doc remarked sedately, “Perhaps we should turn around.”

“I’m a mile ahead of you,” Pettis replied, completing a 180-degree curve.

As if in a nightmare, more wolves had melted out of the shadows into the weakening daylight to block our retreat. As we watched, more were lowering themselves deliberately from roofs, gliding from alleys and doorways. Every building around us was spilling wolves into the street.

A broken murmur of growls built into a deep angry wave of sound. In the leaving light, their yellow eyes glowed like ranks of fireflies.

Pettis braked the van. For a moment we hung suspended, caught in time. I feared that Cowboy had given up. The wolves angled in closer.

“Hold on,” Pettis ordered.

He rammed the engine into gear and tore straight for the file of wolves in front of us. Abruptly, he made a screeching left turn into an alley between two small buildings, one of them a barbeque restaurant named Raoul’s. The alley widened into a parking lot. At high speed, Pettis drove toward the back corner where a concrete curb formed a border with another parking lot behind. We mounted the curb with a jolt. Pettis negotiated a narrow alley that led into the adjoining street. Tires squealing, he turned sharply and accelerated.

“We’ve got the bastards,” he said.

Ahead of us, the street snaked left and right. Suddenly, there was a roadwork sign. Pettis pushed the engine, cutting close to the sign, knocking down a sawhorse next to it. The tarmac ended, throwing us onto a dirt road that melted to rough desert. Hopkinsville ended behind us; to the left was the paved highway.

Pettis angled us toward the highway. We took it with a jump and skid.

We topped a slight rise. This time Doc said, “I hope you’re still a mile ahead of me.”

Howling in anticipation, a phalanx of wolves waited for us, blocking the road and the desert to either side.

“Anything you want, Doc,” Pettis said, slamming the truck ahead.

We hit the line of wolves. I felt the thump of bodies against the van. One wolf hit the roof and rolled over it, keening in pain.

We were through the battle line, but we weren’t free of the wolves. Those at the outer edge of the phalanx began to run with us. They were frighteningly fast, their powerful hind legs moving like pistons. They glided on all fours like sleek greyhounds, their yellow eyes never leaving us. For a moment my eyes locked with one of them, slower than the rest, its loping strides hampered by a hitch as it favored one paw—

“Shit!”

We had slowed hitting the line, and Pettis fought to control the van and get it back up to speed. For a moment it looked as though he had failed, and we went into a sideways skid. I felt the van tilt, and then suddenly Cowboy had it righted and we straightened. He slipped into third gear and we began to pull away from the pack.

One wolf, however, kept pace. In his eyes I thought I detected some of the raw hate I had confronted in the original beast that had invaded my home. It was logical that the meteor-borne wolves would be faster than the human victims they had added to their ranks.

The speedometer read close to seventy. Still the wolf kept pace. He was shearing closer, eyes tight on the van as if magnetized, tongue lolling in exertion.

“Come on,” Pettis urged the van. He glanced at me. “Get your shotgun and try for him.”

I pushed the curtains completely aside, flipped the window latch, and slid it open. I steadied the gun against the window frame, feeling like a frontiersman aiming out of a stagecoach. I sighted along the barrel into the burning yellow eyes of the wolf.

I pulled off one shot, then another. Both went wide.

“I told you you were a lousy shot,” Pettis shouted.

Holding the steering wheel tightly with one hand, he thrust the Uzi at his daughter in the seat next to him. “Try this.”

She rolled down her window and sprayed the wolf with fire. It broke stride, then recovered. She fired again, putting a bullet into its throat. It screamed, stumbled, then with a burst of resolve closed the distance between us and leapt at the side of the van, hitting the front door. It howled piercingly.

Amy screamed, sliding away from the window as the thing held onto the open window frame with its claws.

It began to pull itself into the car. I fumbled with my shotgun, trying desperately to load it. Amy had dropped the Uzi and screamed, pushing herself against her father as he fought to control the vehicle.

Calmly, as if he was taking out a mechanical pencil, Doc removed a pistol from his pocket, pointed it at the monster’s head, and pulled the trigger. The body fell out and away, tumbling to the desert where it lay unmoving.

Amy was hysterical. Pettis held her against him for a minute, then pushed her gently back into her seat. She stared at the blood on the door, then rolled the window up, shivering.

“Why did you wait so long?” I asked Doc, who was serenely returning his gun to his pocket.

“I thought you’d prove yourself a good shot after all,” he quipped, smiling slightly at the spill of shotgun shells in my lap and the still empty shotgun.

Pettis brought the van up to seventy-five. I saw the green glow of his watch.

“Six thirty-five, Doc.”

Doc paused before saying, “We might just make it.”

CHAPTER 17

Night Journey

Twenty minutes later, we began a long climb into the mountains. There was something strangely familiar about the road we were on. I would have known it immediately had I been able to associate our van’s flight with the pleasant and frequent afternoons I had spent as a tourist on just this trip. A few minutes later my realization was confirmed when we made a sharp turnoff beside a small sign that read gift shop and information center ahead, and the looming white outlines of two telescope domes rose tantalizingly into view before dropping behind the curve of the steeply climbing road.

“Mount Locke Observatory?” I asked.

Doc looked at me. “Of course.”

When I continued to look dumbly at him he said, “This is where Proctor will be.”

Pettis added, “If he’s still alive.”

Doc merely looked quietly past me through the window as we drove by the parking area, past the administration building, and the headlights illuminated the damage that had been done to the dome of the 102-inch telescope.

“Goddamn,” Pettis spat.

The dome’s observation slit stood open, as on any night, but its beautiful white coat, trimmed in orange, was scored with claw marks. One of the tall antennas mounted beside it had been ripped out; it stood out from the side of the white structure like a spent arrow.

“Not very pretty,” Doc offered.

Pettis grunted in reply.

Far below us, at the base of Mount Locke, we heard a wolf cry. Before long, the enemy Moon would make that lonely sound epidemic.

Pettis drove the van around the dome to a small cove beneath the telescope set into the rock wall of the mountain. There was a garage, its door opened wide. Three of the four berths contained wrecked automobiles. The fourth was empty and Pettis parked in it.

We unloaded, and Pettis then scattered broken glass and metal parts from the other three cars over the van.

“Will it work?” I asked.

“Stay out and see if you want,” Pettis answered testily.

Brandishing his Uzi in one hand, a flashlight in the other, Cowboy began to walk toward the main building containing offices. Doc stopped him. “That’s not where he’ll be.”

“It’s the only secure—”

“Come with me,” Doc answered.

The glass doors to the 102-inch dome had been smashed, the steel frames twisted. The elevator inside was open, but the control buttons had been ripped out of the wall and one of the doors caved in. The stairs were littered with debris—broken frames exhibiting photographs of comets and galaxies, scattered pamphlets preaching the wonders of astronomy and of the telescope the visitor was about to see.

Pettis went up first, the short snout of his gun raised in front of him. The stairs ended in a short landing. There was a sign that said 2nd floor.

“Keep going,” Doc urged.

We went up. “I don’t like this,” Pettis said. A moment later he motioned us to stop. “There was a sound downstairs,” he said, but we heard nothing farther. We went on.

When we reached the third floor Doc told us to stop.

Pettis regarded the door, which was pitted with dents. “I still don’t like this. There’s no way—”

“You’re not the only one good at surviving, Cowboy,” Doc replied. He pushed past us and opened the door.

Flashlights beaming ahead of us, we entered a cavernous room dominated by the monstrous tan-colored tube mounted in the center. It resembled a wide artillery gun whose short barrel might propel Jules Verne’s capsule from the Earth to the Moon. Beneath it, cables snaked across the floor over the huge disk-shaped base that rotated the telescope.

It was deathly quiet in the room. Our steps echoed with the same sound one hears when walking in an empty church.

A flash of red lit the top of the telescope tube.

Pettis was faster than I was. His machine gun targeted the light.

“Wait,” Doc called out sternly.

At the top of the tube there was a metallic scrabbling sound. In the lighter contrast of the night sky filling the open dome slit I saw the outline of a head.

“Goddamn,” a voice called down angrily. ‘Turn those white lights off!”

“Wyatt?” Doc shouted up, cupping his hands around his mouth.

“That you, Baines?” the voice answered in a milder tone. It held a drawl that was not altogether Texan. The red light went out, and then a white light went on, illuminating what looked like a square cage with a man in it. “Come on up.”

Doc chuckled and led us to a corkscrew ladder that snaked once around the telescope mount. This left us on a short ledge, above which was a metal-runged ladder locked at chest height, which we mounted one by one.

As I was helped up into the cage I looked down and gasped. At the bottom of the telescope tube I saw my own face, and those of my companions, reflected in the mirror to gargantuan, carnival size.

I staggered, but a strong arm took hold of me.

“Hold on there,” Wyatt drawled mildly, as he settled me into a sitting position at the bottom of the observer’s cage we occupied. “Can’t have you falling thirty feet and hurting my mirror. Had a student down at the university a few years ago decided he didn’t like the look of his face in that mirror. He climbed down and took an ax to it. Put four nice chips in it before me and the security man got him out.” He smiled—a lazy, friendly gesture in his bearded face. “Hit him myself with this.” He held up a long dented metal flashlight for my inspection, then switched its red filtered light on and turned away from me.

“Not gonna have long tonight, Doc,” he said. He turned off the white light bulb clamped to the top of the cage, leaving us in red glow. “Not that it matters much,” he continued wryly, bending over a chart that was unfolded at his feet, “since my night vision’s shot anyway.”

“We could have left you here alone,” Pettis said.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought how nice that would be,” Wyatt replied. “But I think you’ll find it interesting enough around here tonight to make you happy you came.”

He concentrated on his map, and I leaned over to see what the red light revealed. It was a large, finely detailed map of the full Moon. Craters were drawn and identified down to a scale I had never seen before.

The map was marked up in grease pencil. A huge, roughly triangular section covering the crater Aristarchus stood out boldly.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the marked area.

Proctor turned his slow, warm smile on me. “You’ve got a treat coming,” he said.

A few stars had risen; Orion’s hourglass torso was just beginning to thrust itself into the eastern sky.

Wyatt turned his gaze on Pettis, who was studying the shadowy grounds outside the dome through the open slit. “Don’t worry, Cowboy.”

Pettis grunted and resumed his vigil. Amy sat curled in one corner, half asleep.

“Got a little occultation work done last night,” Wyatt said to Doc. “The computers got smashed up the first night, and then I lost power, so I had to do everything by hand. Hell,” he smiled, “it’s like being back in high school with my first six-inch reflector. Got a couple of photos in before the Moon came up last night.” His face partially clouded. “I left the plates downstairs and they got smashed up, though.”

“Wyatt,” Doc said slowly, a smile spreading across his normally solemn face, “don’t you know what’s been happening?”

Proctor looked hurt. “I know what happened. You bozos said you’d get me when you needed me. What the hell else was I going to do? You know what it’s like trying to get any time on this telescope?” He grinned. “I’ve had four nights alone with it!”

“Anybody up here with you the first night?” Pettis inquired.

“Young kid from Tucson, along with the security guard. The guard ran when the meteorites started coming down. The kid decided to try to make it home in his Fiat. I tried to talk him out of it, but…” His gaze wandered to the slit.

In the red glare of his flashlight, his face brightened. “There.”

We followed his level finger.

Outside, the first curved fringe of the Moon pushed up over the low desert horizon. It resembled a white scythe cutting the night, killing the stars above it with its light. Even proud Orion was dimmed by its brilliance.

Proctor turned to work the manual controls at the front of the cage, talking as he did so. “The Moon’s beginning to wane. Tonight shouldn’t be as bad as last night.”

“What was last night like up here?” Doc asked.

Proctor smiled. “They got a little uppity.”

“Tonight could be just as bad,” Pettis offered. “That full Moon last night might have given them a jolt that lasts a couple of days. Tonight might just add to it.”

Proctor nodded thoughtfully, turning back to his levers. “Anyway, we’ll get a look before we batten down the hatches.”

He worked around the cage, climbing up and down, lowering himself halfway into the telescope, then lowering himself down the ladder. He enlisted Doc and me to help with a couple of huge ancient flywheels.

Proctor said, “I haven’t had to do any of this manually since I was a student. And even then it was just a kind of initiation rite.”

The big tube began to move. I took pleasure in the slow swing of the massive mechanism, the steady slide through right ascension and then declination that brought the tube into line with the now-risen Moon.

“Go on up,” Proctor ordered. He stayed behind.

We heard him talking to himself at the base of the tube and saw the intermittent flash of his red light. He grunted in satisfaction. The tread of his feet on the metal rungs back up to the cage was subsumed by the soothing sound of a huge clock in motion.

Tock-tock, tock-tock, it tolled, in ponderous, inevitable tones.

“The old spring mechanism still works,” Proctor remarked as he pushed past us to set up an eyepiece in the focuser. “The idiot wolves break what they know, or can reach, but so far there hasn’t been a former astronomer among them, and that baby down there’s encased in half-inch-thick iron. Percival Lowell loved this ‘scope almost as much as his own in Flagstaff.” He sighted down into the eyepiece, turned the focusing knob, then grunted in satisfaction.

“Have a look, Doc.”

Doc looked. I have described his taciturn demeanor, but now he drew in his breath. “My Lord, Proctor, I had no idea it was this vast.”

Pettis looked next, and then Amy, and while I waited my turn I looked out through the slit of the dome. Even with the naked eye I could see that something was wrong with the northwest quadrant of the Moon. From my nights at the eyepiece of my own eight-inch Newtonian, I knew where Aristarchus was. I knew its bright appearance in the midst of the Moon’s largest “sea,” Oceanus Procellarum. But now there was a large area, darker than the surrounding mare, roughly triangular, where the famous crater had been prominent.

“Hurry,” Proctor said, giving the telescope over to me. I looked into the eyepiece of an instrument I had dreamed of using on my many tourist trips up to the observatory, and I gasped. Aristarchus was gone. A huge area in Oceanus Procellarum where it had been was gouged, as if a cosmic spade had dug down into it. All surface features had been blasted aside by a volcanic eruption from within the Moon. Even now, the eruption continued. Tiny flares of red flame dotted the pitted ruins, which reached nearly to the lip of the massive crater Copernicus. An area comprising nearly one quarter of the Moon’s face had been blown out into space.

“My God,” I said. “My God.”

It was only when Wyatt took hold of my arm and turned me away that my eyes broke contact with the horrible sight I had witnessed.

“We have things to do here,” Wyatt said.

Pettis was already pulling up the metal ladder and locking it into position. Doc helped Amy down into the telescope tube. I watched her descend the metal rungs clamped to the inside of the tube, avoiding my own distorted visage in the mirror.

Pettis returned, crouching in a corner of the cage. Wyatt had put another eyepiece in the tube and was cursing the fact that we had not had time to slew the telescope away from the Moon and that he would be burdened with study of only its ravaged face for the rest of the night.

“Climb down if you want,” he said, pointing to the mirrored bottom of the tube. “Your presence will only cut down my light by a fraction. And with the Moon, there’s plenty of light to spare. But don’t chip my mirror,” he said, giving me his smile.

“I’ll stay up here,” I said. He shrugged and turned back to his viewing.

Pettis, still crouching, looked as if he wanted to do anything but occupy an open yet confined spot and wait for something to happen.

“It’s perfectly safe where we are,” Wyatt drawled at him. “We’re thirty feet up. That ladder you pulled up provides the only way to get up here. The wolves are fast and strong and can leap pretty well, but,” he smiled, “not that high.” His grin widened in red light. “Believe me, Cowboy, they’ve tried.”

“What about outside?” Pettis inquired.

Wyatt answered, still smiling in the red glow, “You’ll see.”

“I don’t like it,” Pettis complained. He looked down at his daughter, curled miserably at the bottom of the huge mirror, before turning his hard eyes to the outside air through the dome slit, to wait for the wolves to come.

CHAPTER 18

The Young Girl

We heard their howls and then we saw their shapes. There were about twenty, gray shadows in the moonlight, pacing up the road to the observatory. They entered the front door, snarling, knocking over whatever was in their way, and then they were on the stairs, their claws clicking on the steps. They burst through the door into the room, one after another, yellow eyes aglow. They glared up at us, teeth bared. I counted nine, meaning the others had peeled off from the pack.

Pettis lowered his Uzi to spray them, but Wyatt quietly stopped him. “That’ll just make things worse. I’ve got some work to do, and I’d like it as quiet as possible till I’m finished. If you shoot ‘em, they’ll just make a lot of noise tearing each other up.”

“Damn it, Wyatt!” Pettis complained.

“Just watch,” Proctor counseled gently.

One of the wolves had circled completely around the telescope. It now stopped at the bottom of the platform. It tensed, then ran up the short flight of steps and leaped, trying to catch the bottom rungs of the locked ladder. It failed by a yard and fell yapping to the floor. It circled again, growling in frustration.

“Let ‘em have fun,” Proctor said, returning to his eyepiece. “The real show’s at the slit, Cowboy.”

Reluctantly, Pettis turned away from the commotion on the floor below us. Another, larger wolf had tried to reach the ladder and missed. The others were now milling about, pacing in tight circles, snorting.

Wyatt wheeled from his position at the focuser. “What the—” Pettis said as Wyatt produced a .44 from the inside of his jacket and aimed past Pettis’s ear. Something had appeared at the slit level with us, staring in with a baleful copper glare and then throwing itself across the gulf between dome and cage.

The sound of Wyatt’s .44 echoed through the dome. The wolf fell screaming to the floor, claws just scraping our cage.

Instantly, the others were on the wounded beast, tearing it to pieces even as it howled in pain.

“There goes my peace and quiet,” Proctor sighed. He pointed to the dome slit. “Listen real close; you can hear their claws tapping on the gridwork of the catwalk out there.”

I heard the tick-tick of claws. A wolf appeared. Pettis, Proctor, and I all hit it before it could leap. It fell away into darkness.

“Think you fellows can handle things for a while?” Proctor asked mildly, tucking his .44 away. “I’d like to get some work done.”

“Go on,” Pettis said. There was a slight smile on his face now.

In the next two hours, as Wyatt studied the Moon, Cowboy and I shot four more wolves. One ignored the initial slugs we put into it and actually reached the cage, grasping it with its claws. Its teeth pulled back in rage as it bashed its open mouth against the metal, trying to break through. It began to climb. We put a few more rounds into it. Still it refused to fall.

Proctor, chiding us for disturbing him, pulled his .44 and put two shots into the thing’s eyes. Its head thrashing wildly, it fell into the waiting throng below.

At three in the morning, Pettis nudged me. I must have been dozing because he said, “Why don’t you climb down and sleep?” I protested, until he added, “You’re no good to me anyhow. Relieve me in a couple of hours.”

I agreed and whirled out of the cage and down into the depths of the telescope. The sound of my descent set off a mad rage in the wolves below. My stomach tightened as I reached the mirror. Though there were two tons of glass and metal between us, I was only a matter of feet from the beasts.

Amy was nestled against the curve of the tube, asleep. I crawled to the opposite side and lay down. It was more comfortable than I thought it would be, the bow of my back settling against the telescope neatly, if rigidly. Avoiding the mirror, whose funhouse properties still disturbed what little sense of reality I retained after the past few days, I lay, head cradled on one arm, staring up at the dark forms of the three men in the cage above me. Pettis was silent, Doc and Wyatt talking in low tones, arguing as if they were at a seminar instead of in a tiny metal cage suspended above a pack of hungry, vicious devils that would gladly tear them to pieces had they the chance.

Doc argued reasonably, in his cultured Oxford tones.

Wyatt answered just as reasonably, “The only way is to put them there and hope for the best.”

“Let’s make sure there’s no other way,” Doc replied, and then the two of them launched into another discussion that became less and less intelligible to me.

I stared up at the three men in the cage dreamily, as my eyes began to close…

“Mr. Blake?”

I blinked awake and turned my head to find Amy wide awake and staring at me.

“Am I disturbing you?” She sounded lonely.

“Not at all. What’s wrong?”

She had crawled over to sit near me, keeping a respectful distance but obviously craving company. “I miss my mother.”

“I know how you feel, Amy. I’ve lost two people who were very dear to me.”

“I loved my mother very much. She had a beautiful garden next to our house; she taught me all the names of the flowers and vegetables. She took care of that garden the way she took care of me. She was always there when I needed her.” She hesitated. “My father…”

I was curious to hear about her father, and waited until she was ready to speak.

“My father is a very hard person. He was always busy with his work. When he was there he always demanded so much. My mother didn’t expect me to be anybody but myself.”

“Did your mother and father get along?”

She looked surprised at my question. “They loved each other a lot.”

“All those things your mother said in the bomb shelter—”

“My mother said those things because she didn’t want him to die. He insisted on doing everything himself. She didn’t see why he couldn’t let someone else be the leader. She was afraid.” Amy looked at me as the wolves raged outside. “I’m afraid, too.”

“We’re all afraid.”

“It’s just that…”As she struggled to express herself, a mixture of child and adult, I realized that in the confusion and constant action of the past day there had not been time for her to become a person for me; she had just been one of the players, someone who had come onto my stage, and who might be yanked off at any time. I tried to gauge how old she was: twelve? thirteen? A child who had been forced to grow up overnight.

“It’s just that”—she sobbed suddenly—“I want things to be the way they were.”

She tried to be an adult, not to cry. I tried to think of some magical words to say that would make everything all right. But suddenly she was holding me tight around the shoulders, burying her face in my chest.

“Oh, God, what’s going to happen to us…”

I held her—and then I held her tighter, imagining she was my own child. I tried to comfort her the way I would have comforted Richie. This was a new world, and from now on, all of us would have to be parents.

After a while, her sobs became whimpers, and then she slept. I cradled her against me and leaned back. My spine found a comfortable curve in the belly of the telescope, the metal beast, and I rested.

Up above, Doc and Wyatt still discussed.

“On the far side,” Doc insisted.

“I can see that. And we can drop them right here,” Wyatt countered gently, in his soothing drawl.

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes.

The two men continued their seminar as I drifted toward sleep. And then, in dreams or out, I heard the first thing that gave me hope since Jimmy Rogers’s voice had lulled me from my home and despair, the first thing since all of this horror had begun that led me to believe, as Pettis’s daughter and I and everyone else so fervently wished, that things might be the way they were again.

“One thing we know for sure,” Proctor drawled. I could almost see him grinning in red light. “If we get to do this, the wolves are history.”

CHAPTER 19

Prognosis

I awoke to find Pettis looming over me, his gun shouldered. He was framed by morning sunlight blooming through the open dome slit above him. I had gone through a night of rough sleep; snippets of nightmare mixed with the sound of real gunshots, of wolves devouring their mates, and through it all, unimpeded, the careful, slow discussion by Doc and Wyatt of the future of the Moon and Earth.

“Thanks,” Pettis said softly, indicating the still-sleeping form of his daughter. I had forgotten about her. But now, the stiffness of my body announced itself with gusto.

“You were supposed to wake me,” I whispered.

Amy stirred and sat up, rubbing the rough night from her eyes.

“You were busy.” Pettis crouched next to his daughter, talking to her gently.

I stretched, then climbed to the cage above. Wyatt was curled in one corner under the focuser, snoring, while Doc stood peering over the side of the cage at the floor below.

“Remarkable beasts,” he said. The floor was littered with destruction. By the door two dead wolves lay in a fierce embrace, tearing mouths locked onto one another’s necks, claws buried deep into chests. They had obviously been the last, because the rest of the room was dotted with neat mounds of white bones.

“Wyatt shot those two as they were slinking off at dawn,” Doc said. “As soon as they were wounded they went berserk and tried to rip each other to shreds. Blood sends them into a feeding frenzy. And yet, their mindlessness lasts only as long as the blood. After devouring a victim, they reverently stack its bones. Wyatt thinks it has something to do with religious belief, or fetishism. It’s an intriguing thought.”

He lapsed into silence. “What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Tea, actually.” He gave me his wry smile. “It’s been four days since I’ve had a cup of tea. They had none of it in that bomb shelter. Only coffee. I don’t know what you Yanks see in the beastly stuff. Ground-up beans.” He made a face.

“Why didn’t you tell me there was a plan to get us out of this mess?”

“You didn’t ask,” he answered. “As a matter of fact, whether there is one depends very much on how much of Kramer Air Force Base is intact. If—”

“If any of a thousand things went wrong, we’re dead,” Pettis completed, reaching the cage ahead of his daughter. “I didn’t tell you, or anyone else, because first, it was a national security matter, and second, I couldn’t see any use in getting anyone’s hopes up. And anyway, we still don’t know it’ll work.”

“We’re going to try, aren’t we?” Amy asked him.

“I sure hope so,” Wyatt drawled from his corner, yawning. “If not, all those brilliant ideas of mine last night went to waste. Anybody hungry?” He looked at Doc and grinned. “It just so happens there’s some tea, if you’re interested.”

“Bless you!” Doc said. “Even if your ideas were all wasted.”

They revived their symposium as Pettis unlocked the ladder and we descended.

Proctor was better than his word about breakfast. There was a commissary stocked with a hidden hoard of untouched food. The eggs were powdered, but there was marmalade, biscuit mix, and tins of canned fruit. Wyatt was a good cook, and with Amy’s help, we soon were eating a hot, rejuvenating breakfast.

“I might as well tell you,” Doc said, his fingers caressing a cup of Earl Grey, “what we have in mind at Kramer Air Force Base. The shuttle Lexington, which has been docked at Kramer for the past seven months, is more than capable of making a round trip to the Moon in its modified form. You may have read something about it in the popular journals, though the military has tried to keep a tight lid on it.” He looked at Pettis. “I can’t imagine there’s much in the way of national security left.”

Pettis waved a hand. “I’ll tell you when to stop, Doc.”

Doc looked at me. “Have you ever heard of Big Dumb Boosters?”

The term rang a bell, but not a loud one.

“On the drawing board,” Doc continued, “Big Dumb Boosters, which were designed in the 1960s, would have made the space shuttle unnecessary. They were to have been massive launch vehicles, quite similar to the Energia rocket that the Russians have developed and utilized so effectively. Quite simply, they would have been giant, unsophisticated first-stage rockets to lift great weights into space.

“But NASA, with the military behind it, decided on the much more complex and technologically showy space shuttle to exclusively perform the tasks that the BDBs would have, and since the shuttle would get all the money and attention, most other plain booster research was abandoned.”

Doc sipped his tea. “After the shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, NASA, and especially the Pentagon, realized just how vulnerable the space objectives of the United States were with all of its eggs in the shuttle basket, and the Big Dumb Booster concept was revived. It was all done quietly, through the Air Force, because the NASA budget just wasn’t there for it.”

He finished his tea and looked longingly at the empty cup. “To make a rather long story brief, there’s a Big Dumb Booster at Kramer Air Force Base, with the space shuttle Lexington attached, capable of reaching the Moon. It was to have delivered a retooled lunar excursion module to the Moon to defuse the public relations impact of the Soviet Mir space station, and to monitor recent Soviet lunar activity. The plan now is to strip all that military spy junk out and pack a good load of nuclear weapons, which they just happen to have at Kramer, on board, and—”

“That’s enough, Doc,” Pettis said.

Doc frowned. “I can’t really see that it matters if we tell him—”

“Maybe later.”

“I’ve been thinking about that last calculation we came up with…” Proctor said, wandering into the conversation.

Wyatt and Doc resumed their discussion.

“We’d better check our transportation,” Pettis said, motioning for me to come with him as Amy cleared the table.

“I want you to understand something,” Pettis said when we got outside. “I saw how bright your face got while you were listening to Doc’s bullshit. That’s exactly the reason I didn’t want to say anything about this.”

“You don’t think we can get out of this?” I asked.

“We might. But probably not. I’ve never been much of a pessimist, but I think we may already be finished as a race. Have you thought about how quickly things fell apart? Use what happened in Hopkinsville as an example. If the wolves landed everywhere on the planet, you’ve got half the human race dead or metamorphosed the first night. By the second night, three quarters of those remaining are gone. By the third, nearly all the rest. We started out with seven hundred in Hopkinsville. We barely got out with four. Those are bad odds. Couple that with the fact that the first thing the beasts destroyed was the technology, especially communications, and I don’t see much to sing about.”

“But maybe—”

His anger flared. “I don’t like maybes. They only make you think too much. It’s either yes or no.”

“What about Amy? Don’t you think she needs you now a lot more than she ever did? Don’t you owe it to her to keep going?”