Red Moon by Benjamin Percy

tissues. Photos of the boy—“the Miracle Boy”—his expression grainy, a blanket shrouding his shoulders, escorted by police. Photos of the dead, a special insert in USA Today memorializing them, their names, ages, hometowns, occupations, hobbies, surviving family. Three 737s—553 corpses.
    Nothing about her.
    American flags snap from every porch. Stars-and-stripes magnets decorate every bumper. And this morning, outside a McDonald’s, a man with a bucket and a sudsy scrub brush works over the brick exterior where someone has spray-painted Eye for an eye, lycans should die .
    The kind of rhetoric she’s read about in books, seen in movies, heard about from her parents, but never experienced firsthand. She debates whether she should go in, the building seeming poisoned, but the smell is too good, the fryer grease making her mouth damp, and the day is so cold, chasing her into the warm, brightly lit space. She buys a large coffee—two creams, two sugars—and a Big Mac, large fries. She has never had a better meal in all her life.
    She pulls from her backpack the Bismarck Tribune , found in a garbage can outside. Its paper retains the cold and carries it to her fingertips. She finds on the front page an article that makes her lean forward. “Retribution,” it reads, accompanied by a shot of the president standing before a black bouquet of microphones, talking about the “swift, severe, and immediate response taking place at this very moment.” He could not go into details, for fear of tipping off those they pursued, but the American public should rest easy knowing that several arrests had already been made and scores more would occur over the next few weeks. “This is not a time to panic,” he was quoted as saying. “This is not a time to lash out at our lycan neighbors, who live peacefully among us and who are registered and monitored and, with the help of strictly prescribed medication, have forgone their ability to transform. Remember that to be a lycan is not to be an extremist, and I would encourage patience among the public while the government practices its due diligence in pursuing those responsible for this terrible, unforgivable catastrophe.” This was followed by a small quote from a lycan-rights group claiming widespread harassment and persecution in the days following the attacks.
    That was it. Nothing about a house stormed, semiautomatics barking, her parents killed. The men in the black cars and the black body armor were at Stacey’s house too, which means they were probably at other houses, maybe all across the country. She imagines a hundred doors kicked down, the noise like a hundred bones broken, and she imagines the Tall Man stepping through them all. Why wasn’t this news?
     
    She doesn’t know where to go, so she goes nowhere, holing up for ten days in an abandoned motel on the outskirts of Fargo. The Seahorse Inn, it’s called, the paint a faded and peeling aquamarine. The parking lot is riven with weed-filled cracks. The windows are blinded by sheets of plywood. There are twelve rooms, all of them locked, but when she walks around back, she finds an open window, the plywood crowbarred off and tossed into the tall grass. She calls out, “Hello,” and hears no answer. She peers in the window for a long time, the threadbare curtain moving with the wind licking her cheek, until her eyes adjust to the dim light, and then she crawls in, stepping onto a cinder block, slinging her good arm over the sill. Her feet rattle against the many crushed beer cans that litter the floor. Keystone Light. She guesses some teenagers broke in and used the place to party. The wallpaper is patterned with sailboats and starfish. There are light squares on it where paintings used to hang. A hole punched through the drywall. A chair tipped over. The mattress stripped bare and stained with what she hopes is spilled beer. She knows sleep won’t come easily in a place like this, but it ranks better than the