Moonbane

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