Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  But that’s not the truth.

  The truth wasn’t that she was a fighter, but rather that she was the battlefield. She was the town that would endure bombing. She was the field whose trenches would be run through with craters and corpses. Her body and her mind would be the poisoned sand, the shelled earth, the houses burned out through endless sweeping fires.

  And she just can’t do it anymore.

  Her fields are fallow. Nothing more will grow here. There have been greater, deeper costs, too. Her husband left her, because of course he did. She can’t do her job anymore. She had to move out of California because the smoke from the never-ending forest fires makes it hard to breathe.

  She takes the gun, an old Glock she’d been keeping in the closet. Julie checks it. Makes sure that it’s loaded. Then she thumbs the safety off, puts it under her chin, and

  THIRTY-TWO

  THE OTHER GREAT EGRESS

  Julie pulls her hand away, and Miriam feels her piercing stare. The sound of the gun going off still echoes in Miriam’s ear, even though it didn’t happen—not yet, anyway.

  Miriam, for her part, simply breathes. In, out. In, out. The echo of the future gunshot fades, replaced by the sound of traffic all around her: the roar of the highway above, of the boulevard just beyond, of all the city’s endless automation. Somewhere, the crow squawks again: an unfriendly dismissal.

  “Well?” Julie asks.

  “Do you want to know? How it happens? When?”

  Julie doesn’t stop to think about it. “No.”

  “Okay. Cool.”

  “Did you get what you wanted from it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why did you want to see how I’d die, then?”

  “I sometimes get an illicit thrill out of it. Sometimes, it tells me a thing about a person. Sometimes, it gives me a secret. Other times, it connects. It connects to a killer, or some plot, some vicious thread. But mostly, I decided I didn’t like you and I wanted to see how you bit it. I wanted satisfaction.”

  Julie nods, like this is fine. “And did you get it? Satisfaction, I mean.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am too.”

  And with that, they get to work.

  THIRTY-THREE

  PRESSING FLESH

  Three hours later, she’s on a backlot film-set in Culver City, which she’s told is its own city inside Los Angeles, as if that makes any sense. But she goes with it because far as she can tell, nothing really makes sense out here on the Left Coast, and maybe she likes it that way.

  Presently, she has been left alone with the industry at work. She has no idea what’s happening, though it’s becoming increasingly clear that making movies is one of the grandest illusions mankind has ever conjured. Miriam knows that what will end up on a screen is there, in that little box made to look like the front stoop of a Brooklyn apartment: it’s like an unframed, unbordered square of illusion, and that small slice of cinema is supported by infinite infrastructure. Big camera rigs, tracks on the ground, microphones hanging everywhere, monitors here, monitors there, people in headphones monitoring the monitors, star trailers, green screens, craft services tables, cables, wires, boom stands, and who knows what else she isn’t seeing? Somewhere nearby there’s probably an antechamber full of emotional therapy dogs, bags of fancy cocaine, and a cabal of cock fluffers.

  All this to create two minutes of that.

  (That being a trio of millennial actors made to look like they’re having some melodramatic argument on the steps of their apartment building.)

  So much effort to craft a glitzy lie.

  Though, she thinks, that’s the thing about lies, isn’t it? The truth requires only itself, but a lie always needs infrastructure. It needs support. It needs other lies to hold it up, a realm of artifice to keep it running. It’s why lying is so much goddamn work: you often have to craft an entire fantasy realm just to convince somebody of a single untrue thing.

  Truth can be truth alone. But a lie always needs architecture.

  Eventually, they break from filming, and Guerrero wanders over with another man who he introduces as Jack Ellison.

  Ellison looks unlike what she expected—Miriam’s opinion of Hollywood is that it contains an endless stable of upgraded car-salesman types, all schmaltzy and schmoozy, all boozy and blustery, each greasier than a glazed donut, calling everyone babe and chief and other nonsense bro-type nicknames. Ellison, though, has a small sweater vest on, and big clear-frame eyeglasses above an arrowhead nose and pinched, pursed lips.

  “Miss Black,” he says, his voice not so much nasal but rather living somewhere in the back of his throat—not in a dorky way, but in a dismissive, overly aloof manner. He enunciates everything, too: putting a fine point on every syllable. “Jack Ellison. Producer here at Pyroclasm Pictures.”

  He doesn’t offer to shake her hand, but boy, she wants to see how this guy dies. How does a Hollywood producer bite it? God, she wants it to be exciting—gored by a supermodel dressed up as a rubber-clad bull, replete with platinum horns! overdose on a fancy new smart drug with a weird name like Robot or Permanent Marker or Dave! trampled to death in a Santa Monica orgy dungeon!—but she’s also afraid that he dies like everyone else. Heart disease, butt cancer, car crash on the 405, blah blah blah.

  Nothing is so disappointing as a mundane death, Miriam decides.

  “Hi,” she says. “I’m Miriam.”

  “David here says you know how people die.”

  “I do.”

  “You know how I die?”

  “Not yet. Rule is, I need skin-on-skin contact. A handshake. A kiss. A straight punch to the mouth.”

  Ellison shrugs. “Sounds like my last marriage. Shall we get down to business?”

  Miriam notes: He didn’t want me to see how he dies, then.

  Interesting.

  Guerrero explains how this is going to work: “Miriam, we have a number of actors here on set or on adjacent sets. Their agents or managers are going to bring them by, and you’re going to shake their hands. One by one. You’ll see what you can see. Maybe we’ll get a vision that will lead us to the killer. Maybe not.”

  “And what do these people think they’re doing, just lining up like that? I’m not handing out new iPhones. Not to be too on-the-nose with this shit, but what exactly is their motivation?”

  Ellison does this thing where he sticks out his lower lip—it’s almost a pout, but she realizes it’s him doing a kind of condescending let-me-explain-the-world-to-you thing. “Miss Black, actors are basically cats. And before you try to tell me that you can’t herd cats, let me tell you that all it takes is a can of open tuna. You wave it around and they come this way and that, like you’re Moses and they’re the tides of the Red Sea. The actors think you’re Somebody, which is better than Nobody, and it means that one day, you might be able to give them a job. They don’t know what Somebody you are; we’re keeping that story mysterious, because mystery breeds interest, and Hollywood breeds desperation, and desperate interest is an added value here. They will question who you are and what you can do for them, and a question mark is shaped like a hook for a reason. With it, you’ll snag them, reel them in, see how they meet the Grim Reaper.”

  He looks her up and down, narrowing his gaze. The scrutiny has with it the feel of scissors snipping her to pieces.

  “What is it?” she asks. “Coffee stain?”

  “Your outfit. It’s sloppy.”

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  “No, that’s good. We can’t sell you as a producer or an agent—we dress well. But you can be a creative.”

  “A what?”

  “A director. Or a writer. Creatives dress like . . .” He gestures toward her with splayed-out fingers. “You.”

  “I feel judged.”

  “Welcome to Los Angeles. Here, come on.”

  He walks off. She gives Guerrero a what the fuck is this shit look, and he returns it with a faint smirk and a
shrug. Ellison heads over to craft services and waves his hands toward it like he’s a wizard casting a spell. “You need something to eat? Now’s the time. We’ve got vegan treats, gluten-free pasta, seaweed salad, poke bowls, and next table down we’ve got Armanda Glix, a smoothie chef from Vancouver—I recommend mangosteen, maca powder, chlorella, spirulina, and cordyceps. Plus, zhe can make it all black with activated charcoal, so that’s something.”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Miriam says. Her stomach roils at the thought. Her stomach also roils at the just-on-time midday morning sickness. Sudden nausea sits in her stomach like a sponge soaking up a septic spill.

  Still, she follows after.

  Ellison steps into a small trailer, one that’s decorated sparsely—it has a little kitchenette with an espresso machine, and a few pieces of furniture that look like they belong in the tiny apartment of an Icelandic architect: the chairs alone possess a Scandinavian severity, brushed aluminum and pale wood. Ellison gives her one such chair, and it is about as comfortable as sitting on a stump in the woods. “Sit here. I’ll wave the tuna. That’ll bring the cats. One by one, shake their hands; we’ll see what we can see.”

  “Great,” she says. Queasiness makes every molecule in her body feel like it’s on a different boat, rocking this way and that on the unsteady waves of this pregnancy she’s enduring. “Yay. Woo. Let’s do it.”

  The parade of death begins.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  AUDITION

  First up, a doe-eyed stud who introduces himself as Caleb van der Wald. He’s blonde, with a purposefully messy mop-top of blond hair casting its shadow on his otherwise cherubic baby-face. He launches right into his pitch, “I’m playing Hank Spears next season on the CW’s adaptation of the young adult novel, The Brickhouse Boys, but I’m mos def looking for the next big thing, you know?” His California accent runs rampant through his every word, and though he never says the word brah, Miriam feels that it’s pretty much implicit every time he takes a breath. “Like, I don’t want to be typecast or fenced in, if you know what I mean, and I can play the good boys, right, but I can also totally play the bad boys, and—”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, her guts churning. She urps into her hand and then, as if passing the tiny belch onward, uses that hand to grab his and—

  It’s 10:30 AM on a Tuesday and Caleb is on a snowy hill, talking to a young boy with a mop of blond hair and a set of ice-blue eyes, and Caleb says to this boy—who is his son—“You wanna see how Daddy kicks it on a sled, check this out, little dude,” and then he gets on the wooden sled, lowers his sunglasses, and rockets down the slope, hooting and wooing and laughing, but then the sled lifts up and he veers a little left, then farther, then farther still, until he’s no longer heading down the clear path but rather toward a set of evergreens and he’s still laughing thinking, Oh shit, I’m gonna crash, and then that thought is gone from his head as he smacks face-forward into the base of a pine tree, his skull cracking like a egg, the brain bleed spreading fast like red wine from a broken bottle—

  She winces with the tree strike.

  Caleb stares at her like a lost puppy looking for love.

  “Just be sure to name the sled Rosebud,” she says.

  “Okay,” he says, obviously bewildered but not wanting to offend her, the Creative Talent, in this thing that may or may not be an audition.

  Ellison comes up behind Caleb and ushers him away with a dry-as-tinder “Good job, van der Wald.”

  After, it’s a parade of young, mostly white men. Some are hunky stallions, others thin wisps of hipster meat. They have names like Dorian and Dashiell, Malcolm and Logan, and in her head she plays them out like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: You know Dashiell and Dorian and Malcolm and Logan, you know Connor and Spencer and Brickley and Dickhead—but do you recall, the wealthiest prick of them all, oh it’s Chandler, the Trust-Fund Baby, had a very shiny Porsche, and if you ever saw it, it’s probably because he was drunk and ran you over while speeding down Santa Monica Boulevard. (She admits, that Christmas carol probably went a little off the rails at the end.)

  Their deaths are as predictable as they are dull.

  A late-night cocktail of Oxy, Ambien and, well, actual cocktails means vomiting inside your own lungs, yet somehow peacefully—

  A raging case of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea spreads through his body like a brushfire on the Fourth of July, shutting down organs like the lights after a stage play—

  The Porsche hits a skid of scree while driving too damn fast along the cliffside highway, swerving hard away from the sweaty man on one bicycle only to crash head-on into another, and together—as the liquor bottles take flight inside the fast car—they fly off the highway, tumbling down the cliff, not exploding as happens so often in the movies but simply crashing and crumpling there like a microwave thrown off a rooftop before finally making one last lazy roll into the sea—

  (Hey, she didn’t make that Christmas carol up out of thin air.)

  They don’t all die from the expected causes, of course. You get your expected culprits, too: the cancers, the heart diseases, the suicides.

  As each death hits her, as she shakes each hand, her stomach feels loosier and goosier, like it’s not attached to anything inside her and is just . . . sloshing around, her middle a bag of unpinned guts.

  That’s when she meets Taylor Bowman.

  She’s just gotten off of seeing a young black actor die—fifteen years later, after getting his first SAG Award, by tripping and falling in front of a speeding limousine and getting his head crushed like a sat-on birthday cake—when Bowman walks up, with his porcelain anime-boy skin and his coffee-colored hair. He’s all looking at his phone, slurping at a Batman-black smoothie (there’s that activated charcoal), and as he steps up, she catches a whiff of whatever it is he put in that smoothie. It stinks. It smells like fucking feet. She wrinkles her nose and looks up at him.

  “It’s durian,” he says.

  “I already met Dorian.”

  “No, durian. It’s a fruit? From Asia? It’s a superfood. Want a sip?”

  “No. What? No.” She feels her throat shudder. “It smells like someone shoved a half-rotten onion up the ass of a waterlogged corpse.”

  “That’s kinda rude,” he says. Then, to some even younger man behind him, and to Ellison, he mutters: “I don’t need this job, whatever it is. I’m good at CBS right now. I don’t need to look at the horizon, like, because I am the horizon, I think? If that makes sense. Does that make sense? It makes sense to me, anyway.” He offers an insecure little chuckle, like he’s not actually sure if it makes sense or not but he’s just gonna speed past it and hope nobody calls him on it. “Anyway, so—”

  Miriam vomits on him.

  There’s ample warning, probably. She can taste that pukey taste on the back of her tongue. Like a sick dog, she does that thing where she’s tasting what’s to come, her tongue licking the roof of her mouth. She can feel her throat tighten, her stomach loosen. And then it comes. No dry-heaving warning, no time to turn away. Or maybe there is and she chooses not to take that luxury. Either way, she opens up, her jaw feeling like it’s practically unhinging, and then she pukes. Hard. Hot. Fast. A projectile spray full of what-was-once-coffee geysers Bowman in the chest and phone. He juggles the phone and drops it. The screen cracks.

  He yelps like a kicked terrier.

  Miriam doesn’t miss a step. As he backpedals, she spits puke out of her mouth and lurches up out of the chair. “No, you don’t, Tay-Tay.”

  And then she grabs him by the wrist and

  INTERLUDE

  THE MAN WITH THE SHINING FACE

  Slap.

  A hard, open-handed hit wakes Taylor Bowman up. He’s bound to a chair. Still bound. Been bound so long, his hands and feet are numb, so numb they’re less like limbs and more like hunks of dead meat hanging there, bloodless and raw. It’s dark here but he can still see the margins of the room he’s in—a desk, wood paneling, the smell of dry rot and dese
rt sand. He sees an old poster on the wall: got no name on it, though, it just shows a mermaid drawn up like the St. Pauli Girl, drinking a tall seafoam lager. Papers too lie scattered about the room.

  A shadow emerges from the corner of this room. The person who slapped him. Who brought him here. Tall. Lean. Mask over his head. Something gleams and glimmers across the face—a shimmer and shine that make no earthly sense, but Bowman is tired and scared and not sure what the fuck is going on here. “Where is she? I saw her. There in the doorway. Where am I? I just . . . I just wanted . . .” What was it he wanted? Why was he here? How did he even get here? Was something he wanted . . .

  Drugs. He wanted drugs.

  And he got them. Someone injected something into him . . .

  Made his muscles feel like sandbags . . .

  He struggles. The tall man in black, the man with the shining face, comes closer. The man has a knife. A hunting knife with a hooked tip.

  “I have a mask. And you have a mask.”

  When he speaks, his voice is deep and rich, a baritone timbre.

  “What?” Taylor says, mush-mouthed. “I don’t—please, let me go, I’m rich, I got a show, a show on TV, I can pay anything—”

  “You are an icon of vanity. You are a beacon of the narcissistic fire threatening to consume this country. The Me-Me-Me Generation. While the common people starve and die, you traipse about, tra-la-la, chasing Instagram food trends and getting injections of toxins into your skin to keep everything high and tight. You sleep on a bed of money and fame. You got yours, and nobody else matters. Isn’t that right?”

  “No, no, man, it’s not like that—I’m not—”

  “You don’t believe me. I will show you your mask.”

  “Please. Sir. No, no, no, no—”