Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  “Maybe I have a small penis, but I’m comfortable with it.”

  She sips on her iced tea, wishing like hell it had whiskey in it, or was just whiskey in its entirety. “Good point. But I’m looking at you—tall, lean, broad shoulders, long chin. I like the cut of your jib (whatever a jib is), and I think, nah. Solid dick. B+ at least.”

  “Maybe I’m gay.”

  “See, that’s homophobic. Pink is not a gay thing.”

  “And yet here I am, a gay man wearing pink.”

  She narrows her eyes. “Huh. Gay. Okay.”

  “Pink used to be a boy color, anyway. In the 1920s, pink was considered a masculine color, and blue was the color for girls. Pink had connotations of strength, vibrancy, potency.”

  “Like blood. Watered-down blood, maybe.”

  “Maybe. Point is, gendered anything is nearly always nonsense. But on to the real point and my question once again: why am I here?”

  Miriam sits up straight. “I’m ready to cut a deal.”

  “Cut a deal. You mean, come work for me.”

  “Come work with you. I don’t work for anyone. Not you, not God, not—” She almost says the Trespasser, but she snips that off the end of the sentence with a pair of mental scissors. “Not anybody.”

  “Okay . . . ,” he says, sounding dubious.

  “I’m not done. I have conditions.”

  “And those are?”

  “First, I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. Didn’t know that, did you, Mr. Thinks-He-Knows-Everything. I’ve got a worm in this apple, so I need healthcare.”

  His lip curls into a small smile. “Okay. I can make that work.”

  “For life.”

  “That I dunno about, but I can offer it for the duration of your employment—”

  “Partnership.”

  “Fine, partnership. Plus six months after you’re done.”

  She clucks her tongue, thinking. “Fine. That’ll do.”

  “What else?”

  “I get a salary.”

  “That’s already in the pipeline. I don’t expect you to do this for free.”

  “Good. I don’t need a lot, so I’m not asking for beaucoup bucks. I can do a lot with a little.”

  He nods. “Is there anything else?”

  This one, it sticks in her throat a little. “A funeral.”

  “A funeral.” He repeats the word like he doesn’t understand. Because, of course, he doesn’t.

  “A man named Louis Darling died a handful of weeks ago in Pennsylvania. He died with his fiancée, Samantha. I figure he’s been cremated by now. He has no family and I have no idea who will pay for his funeral, so I want the US government to pay for it. A nice funeral. North Carolina somewhere. A small town, a nice town, with a nice cemetery—I don’t care if he’s buried with her.” Samantha, who ruined everything. Samantha, who one day Louis would kill for reasons unknown—though it wasn’t her fault, was it? Miriam’s anger was unfair; yes, Samantha was the other woman, but she was the ventriloquist’s dummy to the Trespasser. It had picked her up, filled her spaces, urged her—even controlled her—to come and intersect with Miriam and Louis.

  And one day, Louis would’ve killed her because of it.

  But then—

  The floor feels like it’s dropping out from underneath her. Her head feels light as a balloon

  (a red balloon)

  as the thought hits her.

  What if the Trespasser would have one day taken over Louis, too? Would that have been possible? Did Louis have, as the demon put it, holes in his soul? No. She refused to believe that. Him killing Samantha would’ve been because she forced him to. It was all part of a cruel chess game played by the Trespasser—that diabolical entity thinking a hundred moves ahead.

  The only way to know will be to ask it. To find the Trespasser and to pin it to the wall and force the fucking monster to talk.

  And so arrives her final condition.

  She swallows hard, and Guerrero can see that she’s visibly shaken. He’s about to ask her something, but she cuts him off.

  “You said you know others. Like us.”

  “I have a small team,” he says.

  “I need . . . help.”

  “Help?”

  “I need someone who can see things. Talk to things.”

  He shifts uncomfortably. “I don’t follow.”

  “Ghosts. Specters. Demons. Invisible fucking entities.”

  Now Guerrero looks really discomfited. He sits up even straighter and shifts his gaze left and right to see if anyone is listening. Nobody is. It’s 3 PM, for one thing, so it’s not a heavy crowd. And the ones who sit nearby are paired off or in tables of groups—they’re murmuring and chatting and laughing, not paying attention to the nutball bitch yammering on about ghosts and boogeymen. (Either that or they heard and just don’t care. The Keys are chockablock with loons and kooks, so it would take some pretty wacky shit to get them to stand up and take notice.)

  “I, ahh.” He clears his throat. He wipes his mouth with the napkin. “I might know someone. Not on my team, though. But he’s not far from where we’ll be going. We have a list, and this person, he’s on it.”

  She leans in. “And where will we be going?”

  “City of Angels. Los Angeles, California.”

  “I’ve never been.”

  “From what I can tell, you’ll either love it or you’ll hate it.” He shrugs. “Probably both.”

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  THE STARFUCKED

  TWENTY-FOUR

  IN THE DARK, ONCE AGAIN

  NOW.

  Miriam awakens, groggy, in the dark. Her head feels like a fishbowl full of wet cement: a sign that after the choke hold, someone drugged her. A sleeper hold like the bartender did on her would’ve knocked her out for five, maybe ten minutes at most. She feels thick. Her every thought first has to surface through a mire of mud and clay. Whatever drug was in her, she prayed it was not hurting the baby. A distant realization lurks shadow-like in the back of her soggy brain, telling her that something so simple as a bad drug cocktail in her system could be the reason the kid dies on the day of its birth—and if that is so, then her chance to undo that turn of fate is now lost.

  She can only hope that this newfound healing ability of hers will help the child as much as it is helping her. If she could mend a knife slash across her bicep after four or five hours of sleep, then maybe her body will metabolize the drug into harmlessness. And maybe, just maybe, the baby had her ability too, for as long as it lurked within her.

  All this, though, is a problem for Future Miriam.

  Current Miriam is trapped, bound in a cramped space.

  Her hands are bound.

  Not her feet.

  She kicks. The margins of her confinement are close, cramped. A vibration rides the space beneath her, thrumming up through her in a mechanical hum—uneven, too, a little dip here, a slight judder there.

  I’m in a moving vehicle.

  Probably in the trunk.

  Her hands are bound behind her, so it’s hard to maneuver and reach for anything, but one thing she knows from this life of hers that other people might not be so quick to realize:

  All trunks in modern cars have an internal release lever or button.

  That is literally a thing, she expects, because enough people are taken and locked in trunks that the car manufacturers had to put it into the design of their cars. It’s like how if you see a warning on a product, DO NOT EAT THIS DISHWASHER DETERGENT, that’s there because someone up and ate the dishwasher detergent. Maybe they were really high. Maybe they were dumb, or suicidal, or a four-year-old entranced by the pretty colors.

  Doesn’t matter. It happened, and so—shoop—on went a warning.

  She rolls over, face mushed into the trunk carpet, ass in the air, fingers waggling above her in the dark—they trace the top of the trunk, the cool metal, and she has to shimmy herself around until sh
e feels it with her near-bloodless finger: the latch release.

  The baby is pissed now because she’s awake and rolling around in positions that don’t make any sense. So, the baby is tossing and turning. Which presses on her bladder. Which makes her want to pee.

  She’s tempted to do it. Just piss all over this trunk, let them deal with it, whoever they are. And it must be a they. She was expecting the Starfucker, and got . . . a tattooed bartender? It didn’t add up. That, plus the spider tattoo, same as she once saw on a playing card in a vision, handed to Ethan Key by a cartel killer? No parts of this are coming together for her, which means there’s a lot yet to learn. But she isn’t going to learn it from the inside of a trunk, so—

  Pop.

  She pops the latch.

  As she does, wind and daylight rush in to greet her.

  Miriam expects to see the bleached, blanched, salt-fucked desert rushing past, but what she gets instead are green, rolling hills. On one side, she sees lines of snarling, tangled vines: grapevines in a vineyard. Old-growth, the vines thick and woody like the roots of an ancient tree.

  Where the fuck am I?

  How long was I out?

  Again, problems that presently need no answer.

  The only answer she needs know is how she gets out of here without dying. The easiest way would just be to roll out and hit the ground. Behind her isn’t a highway but a long ribbon of back-road asphalt. No single or double lines, just the blacktop receding fast. Emphasis on fast. The car is moving swiftly: a clumsy calculus says they’re up over fifty MPH, easily.

  I could just jump out.

  That, once upon a time, would have been the end of the discussion. Miriam would have tucked and rolled out, hitting the road at an improper speed, probably cracking her head or fracturing a limb on the way out. It would have been fast and easy, not to mention it would have fulfilled what was for her a once-necessary condition: it brought her pain, maybe even the threat of death. Though she had sworn off actively ending her own life after her first encounter with the dreaded Harriet, nobody said anything about passively letting her existence in this world lapse.

  Now, though, she’s a bit older. A bit wiser.

  And she’s thinking for two.

  She does recognize though that she seems to be healing injuries these days at an improper rate. Harriet was able to mend grievous wounds—rendering her essentially indestructible.

  Maybe I should just jump out . . .

  No.

  Because suddenly, she has a better idea.

  The hairs on her neck stand up like electrified wires. She can feel it in every skin cell, every nerve, the presence of something above her, out of sight: she can feel the birds.

  In this case, somewhere up ahead, she feels them. She closes her eyes for a moment and slips into the flock: speckled birds, gray and black, a hint of green shimmer behind the dull colors. Starlings. Hundreds of them. A murmuration: the swooping, amorphous shape pulsing and throbbing in the sky like a singular creature, a monoculture, a superorganism.

  Miriam eases back into the trunk, pressing herself into the back of it—she extends a leg, catching the lip of the trunk with her foot.

  With a quick pull of that leg, the trunk closes once more.

  Then she closes her eyes and she becomes the birds.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SHIMMER AND SHINE

  Her mind enters one bird, then two, then four, then a dozen, then a hundred—soon it’s in all of them, her consciousness blasted like grenade shrapnel and lodged in the avian minds across an entire murmuration of starlings. These birds are lost to the dance, thrown into a simple program: never be more than a few feet from one of your mates. Always be close. Wing-to-wing. Beak to tail. They each share the same rule, so they move and duck and fly together: no, not perfectly, but rather like a net stretching and warping one way, then another. The murmuration has no leader, no lone consciousness in the liquid swarm that guides and governs them; somewhere, they have been made aware of a predator—a peregrine falcon, Miriam divines—and so they move en masse, a perfect defense against a hunter like the peregrine.

  There exists, as always, the desire for Miriam to remain here: though it is nowhere as enticing or as thrilling as being in the mind of an owl as it hunts, just the same, there is an elegant simplicity to life in the murmuration. But even now, Miriam’s human mind cuts through and reminds her: this dance is not forever. Soon the murmuration will settle in trees and on power lines. They will break apart, some joining other flocks.

  It is their way. Nothing is permanent. The dance must end.

  And it must end now.

  She will feel guilt about this forever, but it will also be quietly thrilling to her—because again, it fulfills a primal life-ending urge, a suicidal proxy that lets her experience the end of life without committing to it.

  Miriam turns the murmuration down toward the ground.

  Toward the road.

  Toward, in fact, a silver Lexus speeding down that road.

  They plunge swiftly—she must time it right, and time it right she does, for they dive not exactly toward the car but rather toward the space where it will be in three seconds, two seconds, one second—

  TWENTY-SIX

  BIRD STRIKE

  It rocks the car like they’re driving top-speed through a hailstorm, except in this case, the hail is a flock of soft, feathered, blood-filled things. The starlings pelt the car ten at a time, peppering it with a machine gun spackle. The car shudders and skids left. Miriam hears breaking of glass as she comes back to her own body—voomp—and she bears down against the back wall of the trunk, not sure what happens now. She half-expects the car to flip, to roll, but it doesn’t—it slows but never stops. And Miriam thinks, This is it, I can’t wait anymore. So again she puts herself ass up, face down, fingers wiggling—

  Scooch, scooch, scooch.

  They find the lever—

  One—

  Quick—

  Pull!

  The trunk pops, kathunk. Miriam maintains her balance as she scoots to the opening—the asphalt still whips out from underneath the car in a fast-moving conveyor belt of road rash, but the speed of the car has been cut in half, if not better. No better time will present itself, she decides.

  Miriam rolls out of the car.

  Her shoulder cracks hard. Followed by her head. She thinks she’s going to be cool about it, doing some maneuver to help her land, but the impact coupled with her hands being bound behind her allow her no such athleticism. Instead, her body tumbles and rolls like a soup can that fell out the back of a garbage truck. And then, like that, it’s over.

  Panting, heart pounding in her chest like the leg of a flea-chewed dog, Miriam gets herself onto her knees once more. Blood drips into her eye. She looks to her shoulder, sees that the shirt has been rendered to threads, exposing the abraded, now-bleeding, stone-peppered flesh. Everything hurts. But the baby still moves inside her, so she says a small Hail Mary as the car speeds away through a cloud of still-falling starlings.

  Groaning, Miriam gets one leg underneath her—

  Then the other—

  Wobbly as a spinning top, she stands.

  Then she hears the shrieking of brakes.

  The Lexus, now 500 yards off, shows off a set of red brake lights like the eyes of a waking demon as it skids to a complete halt. The road behind sits littered with hundreds of bird carcasses, the wings bent akimbo, beaks shattered amid glittering ice cubes of windshield glass.

  The driver-side door pops open.

  A man steps out. Broad, sharp shoulders sit tucked in a silver suit jacket. A slim waist circled by a black belt. And a mask he’s currently pulling over his head: a black balaclava that suddenly shines in the light of the sun, gleaming in a hundred directions, eerily, freakishly bright. Sequins, she thinks. What a fucked-up, absurd thing: the front of the mask is stitched with a carpet of sequins, like a disco ball.

  The other thing that shines is the knife in his hand.<
br />
  The killer begins to stalk through the dead birds toward her.

  Miriam looks up and down the road. No cars are coming to save her. The sky is big and blue and empty. No planes. No helicopters. Not even another bird that she can see. She is alone out here.

  It’s her, the open road, and an encroaching killer.

  On one side of her, green hills and fields, on and on, endlessly anon.

  On the other, the vineyard, and beyond, a fence row of tall trees.

  She makes her choice. Miriam, hands behind her back, her one leg funky from the fall, limps toward the vineyard, toward the maze of vines.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  THE CITY OF LAST ANGELS

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Trash and the Glamour

  THEN.

  They have a home.

  It’s a temporary one; Miriam knows that. This apartment is a way station, nothing more. Still, she feels herself again slipping into that comfortable fantasy, the same fantasy she felt with Louis out there in the Pennsylvania woods: their precious little snow globe, settling in together away from the world, against the world, without the world. God, she misses him. She misses him like she misses a front tooth or a thumb. But she has Gabby now. Gabby, who comes up behind her on the balcony of their third-floor joint, overlooking the one palm tree, the pool, the pantsless sleeping guy in a Hawaiian shirt floating in the aforementioned pool.

  She puts her hand on Miriam’s back with one hand and with the other presents a steaming mug of the blackest, bleakest coffee. Miriam takes it and bathes in its bitter steam before supping a long, scalding sip.

  “God, that’s fucking good.”

  “Morning to you, too,” Gabby says to her.

  Outside, the orange fireglow of the sunrise is fading, soon extinguished under the blanket of acid-wash denim that will coat the sky.