Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

The rest stop was ringed by a wide lawn, where the prairie had been routinely mowed close. People had already dug in, setting up a shantytown of makeshift lean-tos and campsites. Some had tents and canopies, while others had fashioned structures out of boxes and other items apparently from the looted trucks, including office furniture and inflatable rafts. Beyond this improvised residential zone, the prairie extended across the broad plain. Chase could see faraway figures wandering the expanse.

The lot was congested, cars closing off all but a narrow artery of pavement that unevenly parted the jumble of parked vehicles. As he struggled in his sleepless state to navigate through, the truck lurching and stopping, a couple of men who had been standing off to one side began to follow him. Slack-jawed, with heavy-lidded eyes, they kept pace, staring into the bed. He sped up and found himself facing another barricade. This time, his way was blocked by the many cars that had been driven down this narrow passage before him into a dead end and abandoned. All a trap! He threw the truck into reverse, badly grinding the gears.

Driving backward, however, proved to be beyond his present capabilities. His foot was too heavy on the pedal, his hand-eye coordination out of sync. He smacked into a parked car, the back end of the truck biting into the hood. The impact whipped his head back and left the truck sitting on an angle in the tight lane, wedged in on both sides and stalled. The sheep was silent, but he felt its distress and went to it, leaping out the door and climbing into the befouled bed. His foot hung up on the rack and he fell forward, face grinding into the piss and droppings that gathered in the grooved floor of the truck bed. The animal, crammed on its side in the corner of the bed, did not raise its head. It watched with heavy-lidded eyes as Chase sat up on his knees in the waders, spitting frantically, wiping at his face. He edged toward the creature, which appeared to be paralyzed, and pressed his hand into its warm back. Still, it did not lift its head or scramble to its feet. He patted the sheep and dust rose out of the fleece.

“Looks like you got something to give for all this wrecking you did,” someone said. There were several people now, gathered around the truck. They looked through the bars of the side racks: Chase caged, along with his sheep.

“Get away,” Chase said.

“That’s pretty good those kinds of animals once you take the fur off,” someone said, “if you can find the zipper.” It was one of the men, Chase could see, who had followed the truck as he drove in. He glared at the onlookers. All of them sleepless.

“And cook it with some fire, you have to do that to it,” someone said.

A large woman, who reached in with her heavy arm, said, “You give us that animal because it’s the way it works around here especially after you crashed up this person’s car so now its all crunked up.”

“Not going to happen,” Chase said, throwing himself over the sheep. He kicked at the woman’s arm and held the sheep tightly under him, but rose when he heard them fumbling with the gate. He scooped up the filth from the bed with both hands and flung it in their direction. He did it again, splattering those pushing in for a look. They backed away in disgust, cursing at him. “You don’t want this sheep,” he yelled. “This sheep is toxic! You can see that this sheep is toxic!”

“He’s lying,” his echo said.

But the sleepless heard only the word “toxic.” It burrowed in and their fear pulled them back. They wiped desperately at their faces, their necks, wherever he had struck them with the manure, spitting and gagging.

“You are so fucking inappropriate!” someone said.

A woman pointed at his groin. “Look how it arouses him to be so vile like a dog!”

“Oh my crap it’s true look at that gearshift there so jutting!”

Chase continued to scoop up the shit pellets and sidearm them at his tormentors. But they had moved back, out of range, even though he charged at them and leaned far out over the racks. “We are toxic!” he yelled. “Don’t come touching us!”

“He sleeps!” the echo shouted.

“Now who’s lying?” Chase said. But he didn’t yell this. He didn’t want a response. He sat back, his legs splayed out. The sheep was next to him. It wasn’t breathing right. Its side was rising and falling too quickly, Chase thought. Every now and then a little bubble of blood would form from one of its nostrils. It was panting. Chase pushed the animal’s pale tongue back into its mouth, clamped the mouth shut. He patted the sheep on the face, his fingers jabbing it in the eye. “I won’t let them don’t worry,” he whispered, gripping the animal’s ear and twisting it toward his mouth, so only the animal heard. So it was just between the two of them. “They aren’t going to get to do anything.”

He lay back hard against it, knocking the wind out of the dying animal.

THEY came several times in the night for the sheep. Each time he was able to fend off the insomniacs by screaming and throwing sheep shit scooped off the floor. Sometimes he remembered to say his line about the animal, both of them, being afflicted with some kind of toxic disease. Other times he just savagely lashed out at the vague figures that emerged from the darkness, edging in from the boundaries of his vision. He kicked up at them as they closed in, but his feet never made contact and they vanished when he squinted and focused.

In the darkening plain he saw bonfires burning and he was envious of the light and heat. The temperature had dropped as night descended. There were matches in the front pocket of the waders, he knew, but what would he light? Maybe just one leg of the sheep like a torch. He sat shivering in his T-shirt and waders, listening to the murmur of voices, which was sometimes punctuated by shouts and screams—an eruption of unseen conflict. He sensed that a black moon had risen, a sphere of sleeplessness that pulled at the tides of blood—an invisible explanation for the madness welling inside.

Once in the night, his eyes sought out the source of a terrible far-off shriek. He saw a figure cloaked in fire rushing into the darkness of the prairie. He stood and watched as it suddenly dropped out of view, wondering if the burning figure was the source of his echo. The sheep was still in the dark corner, its breathing a wheezing rasp.

It occurred to him that he was in a bed. In bed with a sheep, sporting a hard-on. This realization triggered a fit of laughter that he couldn’t seem to kill. He roared with guffaws and his echo followed. Just as it seemed to be dying down, it would flutter back into his chest and he would shudder in waves. His maniacal spasm must have signaled a lapse in his defenses since, during this fit, he was rushed by a number of people—men, women, and children. They swarmed the truck, climbed up over the racks. Some came bounding over the hood and onto the cab. They threw themselves down at him. He was knocked to the floor and a mob piled on top of him, crushing him under their squirming bodies. He kicked and ripped at anything he could close his hands around. He gouged at any opening his fingers found. Through the flailing limbs, he saw his sheep lifted, swept up and over the rack by a raging current of hands. He screamed until a knee smashed into his mouth. A desperate, raging strength rose in him and he kicked and squirmed until he found an opening in the thicket of limbs. He rolled off the tailgate onto the hood of the car he had hit earlier. He kept rolling until his legs dropped over the side and his feet found the ground. He growled and bulldozed his way though the people jumping down from the bed, bowling them over and stomping them as he made his way to the cab, where he grabbed the hatchet from behind the seat.