Blood Moon

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  For Tom Doherty and Bob Gleason,

  who walk among giants

  And the amazing folks at the Goddard Space Center,

  who reach for the stars

  There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.

  —Alexander Hamilton

  FROM SAMANTHA DIXON’S JOURNAL

  “I HAVE TO GO,” Alex said, beneath the crystalline sky dotted with what looked like a massive display of the Northern Lights, residue from what we’d unleashed on Alcatraz Island.

  The soldiers who’d come in the Zodiac rafts were all dead and Raiff, our enigmatic protector, was prepping one of the Zodiacs for a quick departure.

  “I’m not coming?” I asked, fearing the answer.

  “You can’t,” Alex said, his voice cracking.

  I should have been relieved, glad to resume my normal life. Except it could never be normal again, not after what I’d experienced, what I knew now. Alex had been my life for three whirlwind days, and I couldn’t bear the thought of parting like this.

  I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just hugged him as tight as I’d ever hugged anyone. And I wouldn’t let go, no matter how many seconds passed. Because as long as I was holding him, Alex couldn’t go off somewhere without me, to continue fighting this war. As long as I was holding him, I’d know we were both safe.

  Alex let go first and eased me away.

  “I’m never going to see you again, am I?” I managed, through the thick clog that had formed in my throat, not afraid to cry, because I saw tears welling in his eyes too.

  “We don’t know that. We don’t know anything really. That’s one thing I’ve learned from all this.”

  I tapped the side of my head. “What about…”

  “We’ll figure something out.”

  “It’ll kill you, Alex.”

  He forced a smile. “I’m tough, remember?” The smile faded from his expression and he took my shoulders in his grasp, squeezing lightly. “I don’t want to leave you either.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Alex looked back toward Raiff, who was waiting for him in the Zodiac, as patiently as he could manage. “There’s nothing left for me here. You still have a life, a family.”

  I turned and looked back toward my parents, who were shaking from the chill breeze and all they’d just been through, barely managing to survive. They were speaking with Dr. Donati, but kept looking toward Alex and me.

  “I can take care of myself, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  “No,” Alex said, smiling tightly. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  “What about the state championship?” I asked him, failing to muster even that much of a smile. “Who am I going to watch play now?”

  “Friday night was the first game you ever went to.”

  “Guess I got bitten by the football bug.”

  Our eyes met, neither wanting to move.

  “We’ll see each other again,” Alex said, his words barely audible. “I promise.”

  And then we were hugging again, and I waited for Alex to let go first again, because I never would have.

  We take so much for granted, simple things mostly, like our routines, our dreams, our goals. Until that football game Friday night, when it had all started, I was focused on graduating as senior class valedictorian. I had applied early to CalTech, the California Institute for Technology, to study space science to pursue a career at NASA.

  My dream, my goal.

  But no more, not after I answered Alex’s call on Saturday night when he had no one else to turn to. I’d been there for him then and I knew I couldn’t refuse him now.

  We were hugging, and then we weren’t. Alex was standing before me, and then he wasn’t. His raft left first, Raiff doing the piloting, and I glued my eyes to Alex until the fog swallowed the small craft, and it was time for me to go too.

  I was naive to think I could just walk back into my life, after all that had happened. Naive to believe it was over, when it had only begun. Naive to believe I could erase the last three days and just walk back into my old world.

  Maybe if I had known what was to come, I wouldn’t have answered the phone. But if I hadn’t, no one’s dreams would’ve had a chance to come true anyway, including mine. If I hadn’t answered that call Saturday night, there would’ve been no college to go to, no graduation to attend, no valedictorian speech to give.

  We thought we had stopped the rising of an enemy committed to destroying civilization, as it was known today. What we didn’t know was how many generations, how many centuries and eons ago, that rising had been set into motion. Nor, as I watched Alex disappear into the fog over San Francisco Bay, did I have any notion that the next battle to stop the rising would be fought not in the light of day, but beneath the shadow of a blood moon.

  PROLOGUE

  THE MONK

  Admont, Austria; April 27, 1865

  May God have mercy on my soul.

  The monk knew he was going to die; he’d known it ever since he’d undertaken this mission.

  The smoke rising from the fires that were consuming the abbey itself and the vast monastic archives dating back to Admont’s founding in 1074 turned the monk’s lungs raw. Embers left flecks of char across his thick woolen robes. Yet he remained comfortable in the darkness, because darkness was his life. Other than a few glances at his reflection in the abbey windows, he had no sense of his own appearance, beyond the long hair normally tucked under his hood and the thick beard that stretched past his throat. Those few times he’d caught his reflection had revealed a pale and sallow visage, from too much time spent in silent prayer and not enough exposure to the sun.

  But that didn’t matter, he didn’t matter.

  Only the book did. The book that had been handed down to him to safeguard for the rest of his life. Eventually, when he grew feeble and infirm, a successor would be chosen and sent in his wake to join the monastic order here at Admont Abbey and take up the same mission until the inevitability of age found that man too. It would continue that way until the book was needed, until the time came when the Resistance of which he was a part could figure out how to use its contents to save this world.

  The monk clutched the book tighter against his chest, the way a mother might hold a newborn, certain whoever had set the abbey ablaze was coming. He’d glimpsed only shadows in the course of his flight, sprawling dark specters rendered absurdly large by the splash of flames.

  The book needed to be protected at all costs. Written in the language of his world that no one native to this one could ever decipher, it contained
the means to fight back against the enemies of freedom, hope, of life itself. An insidious, unstoppable evil force committed to stamping out resistance at all costs, both here and back home in a world he would never see again.

  The monk had made his escape from the abbey via the cobweb-stricken and rat-infested catacombs thought sealed centuries before and, thus, long forgotten. In addition to the book, his predecessor had passed on the location of the secret entrance and a map to guide him through the many warrens of the mazelike confines he had long ago committed to memory.

  The earthen ground and walls smelled of stale, rancid dirt, moist and especially rank in areas where groundwater had leeched in and pooled. This spring had been especially rainy in the region, and the monk feared the ancient integrity of the catacombs might be compromised enough to result in collapse, entombing him for eternity along with the book that provided the only hope for the survival of not one, but two worlds.

  He had only the flame of a single lantern by which to guide him and, suddenly, that flame flickered in the face of a cold breeze that chilled the monk to his very bones. The route he was following through the catacombs lay beneath a vast library with the largest assemblage of man’s accumulated knowledge anywhere in the world, amounting to over seventy thousand volumes displayed and nearly twice that number held in storage. The most valuable items in the vast collection included more than 1,400 original manuscripts, the oldest dating back to the eighth century, and the 530 incunabula, books printed before 1500.

  The monk had always been struck by the beauty of the abbey sculptor Josef Stammel’s creations, especially his “Four Last Things,” which consisted of the oversized figures of Death, Judgment, Heaven, and Hell that adorned the library’s great hall. The monk found those to be particularly appropriate, given the nature of his mission.

  He was thinking specifically of the figure of Death, when he spotted another of the shadows he recalled being splayed against the walls of the burning abbey above. It loomed before him, out of the reach of the meager flame lighting his way. The monk squeezed himself into a depression in the earthen wall to hide within the darkness, extinguishing the flame between two fingers. He heard footsteps that squished into the sodden floor of the catacombs and a guttural retch that sounded like labored breathing.

  Whatever the hulking dark shape was, it was no shadow. Its steps grew louder, a dull red glow brightening as the shape advanced.

  Its eyes, the monk thought, certain he was facing some otherworldly creature he’d been warned about. He sucked in his breath and held it as the thing neared his hiding place, drawing even.

  From the dark recesses of his hideaway, the monk could make out no features other than a pair of blazing eyes the color of blood. Those eyes burned through the darkness, silhouetting the massive shape of a creature that seemed to slither more than walk, making the monk think of a snake with arms and legs.

  He began taking soft, shallow breaths again only when the red glow had passed, the tunnel still and quiet again. He had no way to relight the flame of his lantern and left it behind, only the book to carry as he felt his way blindly to the secret exit that, according to the map, would spill out onto the banks of the Enns River. The monk had long kept a small boat hidden there. Not big enough to get him very far, but at the very least away from whatever monsters had come to the monastery on his trail.

  Why now? What was happening?

  Having spent thirty years in this world, he’d lulled himself into believing he was safe, that the guise of a monk performing his penance in an isolated monastery had served him well in this regard. Believing that he would safeguard the precious book until the time came to pass on that responsibility to his successor. Now the monk knew otherwise, knew enemies from his native world had tracked him down. He couldn’t fail in his mission, couldn’t let the book end up in their possession at all costs, not with the future of two worlds at stake.

  The monk followed the bends and curves of the tunnel to reach a wooden door, camouflaged by dried, layered mud. Open that door and the night was his, just a few hundred meters from the shores of the Enns, where his small boat was camouflaged by brush and stray branches he’d made look random.

  Only the door wouldn’t open, not even budge. The dread realization that the route beyond back to the surface had indeed collapsed, his greatest fear realized. Either from this wet season or another, it mattered not.

  The monk cradled the book in both arms across his chest. If he buried it down here amid the muck and mire, the book would likely never be found. Keep it, and the hope it promised might die with him. The monk found neither of those alternatives acceptable.

  Think!

  The monk had not come here to fail, hadn’t spent thirty years planning for this very moment only to accept death and defeat. He was a warrior whose monk’s sash concealed the scars of battle and whose hands that now held a book had once wielded all manner of weapon.

  Think!

  And then the answer came to him, absurd in its obviousness. The book could be salvaged, preserved against all odds. His life was forfeit in any case; survival meant capture and capture risked him revealing the hiding place for the book he’d settled upon at last, where no one would ever think to look or succeed in finding it if they tried.

  The monk started on again, energized by a fresh resolve. His pace quickened, the map long committed to memory guiding him to the point where it was almost as if he could see through the dark.

  And then he could.

  Because red eyes were glowing behind him, not just one pair but several, having picked up his trail from the burning abbey above. The monk had presided over enough funerals to know the rancid stench of death, realizing it wasn’t dirt these creatures smelled like at all, but rot and decay. As if, somehow, they’d been fashioned of the earth in which the dead were buried.

  The monk ran, trusting in the map and his memory, the book pressed against his thudding heart. The heavy thump of his footsteps drowned out that sound and all others, except for the scratchy breathing of the things giving chase through the tight confines of the tunnel.

  He kept running, maintaining the distance between him and the red glow. A second secret passageway lay somewhere just ahead, and the monk pressed his shoulder against the wall to feel for it. He tapped about its earthen mold, until he struck something solid. Heaved his shoulder forward with all his strength.

  The wood didn’t give. Then a faint reddish glow broke though the darkness behind him, catching him in its spray. He thrust out with his shoulder again, felt something splinter down by the latch as heavy, sloshing footsteps pounded the ground in his wake.

  The monk slammed into the door once, twice, three more times, the rank death smell flooding his nostrils. The door finally gave, and he surged through and charged up a set of stairs through the darkness, the door that would take him into the library gaining shape, almost there …

  Then the monk felt something grasp his ankle. He thought at first it must be a hand, only it didn’t feel like a hand, at least not one he’d ever felt the touch of before. Whatever grasped him seemed to compress itself, while it squeezed. In spite of that, its grasp was stronger than any he’d ever felt, the pain giving way to numbness, before a second rubbery grip fastened on his other leg.

  His stomach turned at the grave stench. The familiar reddish glow dully illuminated the door at the top of the earthen-covered wood stairs, brightening as more of the creatures descended upon him.

  The monk tried desperately to kick free of the twin grasps wrapped tight around his ankles. He felt them pulling, his maintaining a stalemate the best he could do when a tremor shook the world. The earthen ceiling of the catacombs began to rain dirt downward. First in fissures, then in blankets, and finally waves.

  The walls of the burning abbey above must have given way, the entire building crumpling in upon itself and collapsing the secret underground tunnels. The monk held his breath against the dirt threatening to choke his nose and mouth, the red glow
swallowed by the walls tumbling inward. He felt the wet grasp on his ankles slacken and then slip off, creating the brief opening he needed to lurch the rest of the way up the stairs, finding the door just as the creatures flailed for fresh purchase of him, dark clawlike hands that looked as if formed of mud protruding from the piles of dirt entombing them.

  He held the book, the means to save this world, with one hand and worked the latch with the other, bursting through the door into a drainage culvert. The culvert had been designed and positioned to keep moisture from destroying the contents of the floors above him. The monk knew he was in the right place, that his memory had not betrayed him, just steps from the means to stash the book in the best possible place, where its secrets might be preserved.

  He pressed himself against a wall that was moist and soft as clay. His hand nearly sank in when he ran it along the mushy contours for guidance, finding the second set of stairs leading to the library.

  The heavy door at the top burst open, spraying shards of wood through the air, more of the dark creatures revealed pushing their way through in the deepening reddish hue. He couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, hope now and forever lost, the creatures coming for him from above. Then the monk remembered the object in his pocket, designed to provide a brief burst of light when its magnesium wick was ignited by a spark. For emergencies, though not at all like the one he faced now.

  Clutching the book tightly against him in one hand, the monk used the other to yank the object from a pocket sewn into his robe as the rancid, stench-riddled things closed around him, choking his breath. He lowered the thick round husk of wood to the contours of his shoe and struck it to create friction and the spark he needed.

  Nothing.

  Hands dripping with rancid mud closed around the monk, his breath a memory as he felt their grips tighten and pull, intent on tearing him apart. He managed to strike the head of the wood husk against his shoe again.