Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

They turned toward it.

Is that the wood for the fire? Lila wondered. Are they going to chop it down?

The tree was a massive old oak and, Lila could see as they approached, it held in its branches a sloppily built tree house. Really it was a mishmash of old cable spools, plywood, and two-by-fours hammered and roped together. There appeared to be a main platform, suspended like a crude porch about twenty feet in the air, where the trunk split into three massive branches. Higher up were some actual semienclosed and roofed platforms, perched like crow’s nests. Boards had been hammered into the trunk to serve as rungs of a ladder. Some of the tree house had already been dismantled and there were loose pieces of wood, prickly with rusty nails, among the layers of dead leaves all around the base of the tree. Not enough to build a fire, everyone seemed to know as they waited to catch their breath, standing stooped over in the shade of the tree.

Some of the smaller kids caught up and immediately started for the ladder. The boy with the spear pulled them down and started up himself, leaving his weapon propped against the elephantine trunk. The other kids followed while Lila lingered on the ground, hoping her head would stop hurting. The run had set her heart pounding, shooting pain through her scalp and down the side of her face. She delicately caressed her cheek, her face screwed up. Looking up into the dark branches above, she watched the boy in the lead reach the first deck, then start climbing toward one of the higher rooms. Others swarmed out over the deck itself and began hammering at it with rocks they had scooped up, or viciously attempting to pull up boards with their hands. She backed away as chunks of timber started flying down, bouncing off branches and landing in the dense compost of fallen leaves.

Crazy winged monkeys, she thought.

She had started for the ladder when a shout of raw anguish—of volcanic rage—came from above, followed by a scream. Lila flinched and backed away, knowing the sound. A sleeper had been discovered. Is it me? she couldn’t help wonder, panic coursing through her. She scanned the branches and followed the movement of kids as they stormed up one of the ladders, climbing like rats up a rope. High above them, where the boy with the spear had gone, there was a struggle taking place in one of the crow’s nests. Through the slats of the platform, Lila could see only hints of violent motion.

The boy continued to yell, a guttural, choking sound, as someone—it sounded like a woman—screamed, “Get away from me!”

Then a body fell, scream trailing after it all the way down.

Lila could see that she was falling headfirst. A teenage girl. Lila turned away before the body hit and the screaming stopped. But the kids were still shouting from above. They threw their rocks and tools down at the body lying in the leaves. Lila backed away, then started running.

She ran back through the washland, using the overpass as a landmark. As she neared it, she heard claps of gunshot coming from above. They were killing something up there. She ran on, returning to the neighborhood, which again appeared empty. The house she had explored earlier was also vacant. She moved quickly down the hallway and into the cheerleader’s room, where she sat on the bed and began to cry. She fell forward on the bed and sobbed into the cheerleader’s pillow. It was just too much and it wasn’t fair that she had to do it alone. How was she supposed to stay alive in this totally messed-up world? It was her, she thought. It had to be the cheerleader sleeping in the treehouse, then screaming and falling. The hammers and rocks raining down. She recalled the terrible soft thud the rocks made as they struck the helpless body, then shook her head violently, trying to work loose the memory, but was stopped by the pain it summoned.

She thought she heard someone in the hallway. Oh, crap. What if someone should come in? She wiped away the tears and looked for a place to hide. The closet made sense. She opened it and there was the mask, staring out at her. Eyes wide. Always open. Always awake.

WHEN she emerged later that night wearing the mask, she was just as invisible as she had been before. No one questioned the unblinking eyes that covered her face. They were like badges, she thought. Sleepless people actually got out of her way, stumbling over one another. No one had the attention span or focus to investigate. A couple of kids leaned in, trying to see her face through the owl’s open beak, but it was too dark to see much of anything. What would they see anyway? Just two black eyes, the pout of her mouth. Dirty, tear-stained cheeks.

A fire was eating at the stacks of wood piled in the center of the cul-de-sac, casting a Halloween glow. But it had already lived out the most luminous phase of its lifecycle, having flared up and roared, throwing a column of smoke into the breezeless air, then settled into submission. Now the neighborhood people piled on what looked like skinned dogs, strapped with belts to heavy grilles—repurposed iron window grates. They hooked and dragged the grilles into position over the flames with golf clubs.

The smell of burning meat made Lila’s mouth water. She ventured closer to the fire and watched the neighborhood women turn the flayed bodies of birds on stakes. The birds looked like scrawny chickens. Then she caught sight of one of the heads when it flopped into view. They were vultures, she could see. They had shot vultures. The dogs, she realized, were probably the coyotes she had seen strolling up the freeway on-ramp at dawn. Of course they had eaten their own pets, just as they had in her own desert neighborhood. But this cul-de-sac had been blessed with a great lure for living creatures. The pileup of speeding cars on the overpass, the bodies as bait. The scavengers came in to feed and now they were feeding on them. She retched inside her mask, her appetite gone.

She sat on the curb, her back against a feeble parkway tree, and watched what had become of the human race through the mesh eyeholes of the mask. At first glance, or maybe from a distance, she thought the scene could be mistaken for an end-of-summer gathering. A block party barbecue. With people standing around, sharing food, talking about how summer was ending and school would soon start. But the reality was no one was talking about anything. They seemed oblivious to one another as they gnawed on half-cooked hunks of meat. They wore bizarre assemblages of clothing, or no clothes at all. They squatted like apes to shit on a neighbor’s lawn or crouched to suck water out of a sprinkler.

She stood, head in a tiny globe of darkness, fronted by the same protective pattern found on the wings of butterflies and the flared hoods of cobras. She decided it was time to go. Drowsiness pooled behind her eyes, starting to press. It would be suicide to fall asleep here. What she should do was find a bike. She was only about two hours away from home by car, she figured. The desert lay beyond the wall of mountains. She could get there. Just follow the freeway back, up through the pass, right?

In her mask, Lila moved away from the fire, scanning the yard clutter for anything she could use. A map, maybe. She was prodding at a file cabinet someone had apparently pushed out a window when she heard a groan.

She squinted into the darkness, into the backyard of a large house. Suspended between two trees, she could see the faint form of a hammock. It sagged, its middle swollen with the weight of a body. Again, a groan.

She edged toward it.

His face was also concealed, behind a slick mask of blood, but she knew it was the Marine driver. One eye was mashed shut and the other looked out at her from a gummy slit. She could see that his legs were strangely bent, propped before him. Blood bubbled from his flattened nose and his lips were flecked with shards of teeth. She winced inside the mask. They must have brought him here. Found him during the hunt and now here he was, abandoned, forgotten.