Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  “This will take a while. I will need you to hold still.”

  A flash of a needle. The plunging sting in the side of Taylor’s neck and then everything goes slippery and sideways. But he remains awake. The dose is just right. His body feels disconnected from his brain—but his eyes are still open and still seeing, even if he can’t say much except drool-mush gabble in response. He feels something tugging at the side of his face, a tug-tug-tug, a pull-pull-prod, and slowly the vision in his left eye is obscured by something, like a flap of curtain pulled over a window—then the blood runs into his eye. It happens again with the right eye, and slowly, surely, something peels away from his face, and he thinks, What is that? Is that plastic wrap? Is that a mask? He said it was a mask. . . .

  The man with the shining face now holds something up like a dishtowel, and Taylor wants to laugh and say, Why are you showing me this? It has holes in it. Three holes, by the look of it, and he tries to close his eyes and go to sleep but he can’t. His lids won’t respond.

  And then it dawns on him what he’s seeing.

  The light through the eyeholes.

  Through the hole where the mouth once was.

  The margins of the lips.

  That faint little mole on the left cheek.

  It is his face.

  He is staring at his own face.

  The man gently sets it upon the desk so that it’s draped over the edge, so its hollow empty eyes can continue to regard Bowman.

  Then there is a hard, stubborn feeling that ripples across Taylor’s middle—a body-shuddering line pulled from left to right, and then he feels suddenly, strangely lighter even as his lap feels heavier.

  He looks down and sees that the man with the shining face has put something in his lap, something gray and gleaming, something big and blobby, an asymmetrical tangle like a bundle of serpents . . .

  My guts, Taylor thinks.

  Those are my guts.

  The man with the knife takes Taylor’s face and gently puts it back onto his skull with a ginger pat. “Usually I put the mask on display so that you may see it as you die,” the man says. “But here in the half-dark of this back room, I think this is a better display, don’t you?”

  “Muhh. Mmmm. Iiiiii. Whh.”

  “Your mask is gone. You are primed now for your final performance, Mr. Bowman. The cameras will come. They will capture you at your most authentic—this is your rawest, most honest performance yet. . . .”

  As he speaks, the blackness descends upon Taylor Bowman, but in the back of his mind, he hopes that the man in the shining face is right: he hopes he really pulls off this role, that they never forget his performance.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  MOURNING SICKNESS

  It’s later. Miriam sits alone in Ellison’s trailer. Turns out, there’s a shower in there—admittedly a shower big enough for a human hat rack, but given that she’s only a leetle bit preggo right now, she fits just fine as she washed off the coffee puke from her middle.

  Now she sits on one of the uncomfortable chairs, trying to navigate the mystery of what she saw in Taylor Bowman’s death vision and her own emotions about it. Or, rather, her total lack of emotions.

  Because that’s the thing. Miriam doesn’t care.

  She should care. Someone is going to get murdered. But she’s having a hard time conjuring much compassion for a smug little prick like Taylor Bowman. Every murder isn’t hers to solve before it happens. The Trespasser would want her to fix it, because that is what the Trespasser always wants. It wants her involved. It needs her to stop these deaths before they arrive, and why it needs that, she has no earthly idea. To answer that question, she needs to screw that fucker to the wall so it—or he, or she—will hold still long enough for her to demand truth from its spectral lips. But there’s the twist of the knife, innit? Because to find someone who can help her talk to the Trespasser, she has to first secure Guerrero’s help, and to secure Guerrero’s help, she has to solve this murder. A murder she cares nothing about.

  But she cares about Gabby.

  She cares about this baby.

  She cares about getting free.

  Her mother’s voice floats up out of the void:

  It is what it is, Miriam.

  So, she goes through it, replaying the vision in her head again and again. When Guerrero and Ellison come in through the trailer door once more, she’s still replaying it, trying to see what she can see.

  “Bowman is mad,” Ellison says, sipping a smoothie the color of mustard. He licks a blop of it off his lips. “But he’s a turd, and a little turd in a big bowl at that. I got him an invite to a party I’m throwing.”

  “Great,” Miriam says, her voice an acid-chewed croak.

  “You saw something,” Guerrero says. “With Bowman.”

  “I did. The Starfucker kills him.”

  “He’s our next victim.”

  And here’s the part where she disappoints them.

  “What?”

  “He’s not the next killing. If these keep going, he’ll be the sixth.”

  Guerrero’s fists ball up at his side. “Fuck.” He points an accusing finger at her. “You need to do better.”

  “Me? I did what you asked. You put me in front of a line of vapid fuckboy actors, and I got results.” She lurches up out of the chair, feral as a cornered coyote. “Way I see it, that means you owe me a little something, tit-for-goddamn-tat. You owe me a name. I want to meet your medium.”

  “No. Uh-uh. Not yet, you haven’t even told me the details—”

  She gives him the details. “Bowman dies in a dark room. I saw . . . a mermaid poster? I dunno. Looked like an office: desk, papers, stapler, that sort of thing. It happens in four months, like I said. The Starfucker is a tall, thin man. Wearing all black. His face was . . . shining, somehow. Like you figured, he cuts off the face after injecting some kind of drug, then disembowels Bowman with the same knife. This time, he won’t put the face on display, though—he just pops it back on Taylor’s red skull.”

  Guerrero paces. Ellison just stands coolly off to the side, regarding all this like a voyeuristic bystander, slurping his smoothie.

  “This isn’t enough,” Guerrero snaps. “I need more.”

  “Don’t you have, like, actual FBI agents on this shit? Why am I alone your savior? Have you seen me? I’m nobody’s savior, asshole.”

  “Yes, we have a whole investigation.”

  But it’s then she understands.

  “You’re trying to prove something,” she says.

  “No.” But the way he says it, it’s defensive, like he’s got his guard up. It’s how she knows she’s right. She found his tender spot.

  “It’s why we’re working out of a fucking trailer in a parking lot under the 405, isn’t it? You’re not in the Big Boy Building because you’re not wearing the Big Boy Bureau Pants.” She laughs, incredulous. “Grosky’s theories were marginal and you picked them up and don’t have any support, so you need a win, real bad. And you’re pinning your hopes on me. Oh, Jesus, dude, do you know what a bad idea that is? It’s like handing a bag of money to a compulsive gambler and trusting him to invest your money, safe and sound. Spoiler warning: he’s gonna blow it all at the craps table.”

  “You are far from my only hope.”

  “Horseshit. I’m your fucking Obi-Wan and you know it.” She cranes her head back on her neck and grits her teeth. “God, do you even have a team? Is there really a medium or are you just stringing me along?”

  Guerrero is up on her now, in her face, and she can smell mint on his breath and sweat under his arms. His voice is restrained, but he can’t contain the tension and anger there. “You are not the only one I have. There is a medium. You will find out his name when we stop the Starfucker. Then and only then. Until then, you shut up. You do the job. Or you go to jail.”

  Her mouth stiffens into a plastic smile. “You got it, boss.”

  It was a lie. She would betray him. She just didn’t know how yet.
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  THIRTY-SIX

  END OF DAY

  Guerrero parades her from backlot to studio and back again, from Culver City to Century City, all the way up to Burbank. That means she’s stuck in LA traffic all the way there and all the way back. The highways are parking lots. Each car like a glob of cholesterol stuck in a thickening artery. She meets a batch of actors at every location, and in each she sees the deaths, the slip-and-falls, the liver failures, the drug overdoses, the car crashes, the deaths of the young-and-wealthy, but in none of them does she glimpse the man with the shining face. The Starfucker is a ghost once more. And all the way, Guerrero keeps quiet, saying nothing to her. He simmers in his own thoughts. She can see the look of consternation and rage on his face; it’s contained, but poorly, like a demon in a box. No matter how thick the walls of that box, no matter how strongly you reinforce them, you can still hear the demon scrabbling to get out. Claws scraping. Teeth chattering.

  For a time, Guerrero had seemed so put together. So buttoned up. But he, she realizes, is a man repressed. Whether he has some darker specter that haunts him—his own emotional, traumatic version of the Trespasser—or whether he’s just your classic everyday control freak dude, she can’t say. And it doesn’t matter. Because she’s going to have to fuck him over in the end before he fucks her over. It is the way of the things.

  Eat or get eaten.

  Kill or be killed.

  Fuck before you get fucked.

  He drives her back to the apartment instead of the trailer. By now, it’s late, almost 10 PM. As he eases his car—an electric Toyota Mirai—up to the front of her condo complex, he says, “I apologize.”

  “I don’t need your apologies.”

  “You were right.”

  She leans back, certain that you were right are the three sexiest words in the human language. “Okay, go on.”

  “I do need proof of concept with what I’m trying to accomplish in the Bureau. The pressure is on. I have no formal team. I do have others like us in this city and state that have worked for me in a freelance capacity; you’re the first that I’ve brought on in a more official framework.”

  “Do you really have a medium? Someone to help me.”

  “I do. I keep a whole spreadsheet of people like you. He is here in Los Angeles.”

  “Tell me his name.”

  Guerrero reaches up and grabs the steering wheel. He grips and flexes, like he’s revving the throttle on a motorcycle. His nostrils flare when he says, “I can’t do that. I know what happens when I do that. I tell you a name, and you’re vapor. I get a sense of who you are. You’ve told me who you are. The moment I give you that name, I lose all my leverage with you.”

  “So, you’re going to fucking hold out on me.”

  “For now. Until . . . until we get more results. It’s only the first day.”

  “Fine.” She goes to open the door but it’s locked. “Unlock the fucking door or I put my head through the glass.”

  He does as she asks. Kathunk. The door pops.

  She’s out, and he drives off.

  Miriam resists giving him the finger as he goes.

  She takes it as a sign she’s growing up.

  With that in mind, she heads inside and plods up the stairs and unlocks the door, finding herself in a dark condo. Gabby is in the bedroom, face down in a pillow, not snoring so much as she is breathing that loud, slumbering sleep-breath. Miriam contemplates jumping up and down on the bed, singing wake up wake up wake up, because she’s oddly weirdly awake all of a sudden. But she doesn’t.

  Again, she’s growing up.

  She ponders her options. Option one: kick off her clothes, get into bed, lie awake staring at the dark abyss of the ceiling. Option two: sneak out into the living room and, like, what? They don’t have a TV. She could go out on the balcony and . . . Okay, the usual answer here would be smoke and drink, but she doesn’t do either of those things right now. What would she do? Stare creepily at the pool? Sip some mint tea? God, being preggo is the fucking worst. It turns you into the most boring person ever.

  This explains why some pregnant women talk only about being pregnant. It’s all they know. It’s their whole world. They’ve been reprogrammed by the human tapeworm they’ve chosen to host in their body. The parasite makes itself the most interesting thing. I mean, here she is, right now, thinking about being pregnant. It’s just—ugh.

  Miriam chooses to do different.

  She heads back downstairs, fishes out Steve Wiebe’s card, and gives him a call. He answers, mumbling into the phone: “Wuzza.”

  “Put on some pants, Tighty-Whitey Man. It’s time to—” Time to what? “Time to go . . . do something.”

  “What? Who is this. I’m off the—” He pauses. “Oh. It’s you.”

  “It’s me.”

  “All right. Where are you?”

  “Here in the condo complex. In my lovely Palm Coast villa. Waiting for you to put on pants and bring the car.”

  “I’ll see you in twenty out front.”

  “Make it fifteen.”

  “Fine.”

  She makes kissy sounds into the phone and heads back outside.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A MOCKERY OF JUSTICE

  “This is just fruit juice,” she says, staring over a tall tiki glass that looks like some angry island monster frozen in the moment of a vicious bowel movement. “It’s just—” She looks into it, dispirited. “Fruit juice.”

  “It’s a mocktail,” Steve says, taking a sip from his own tiki drink, which is very much not a mocktail. His hair is in a similar pompadour, and he’s got on a different Hawaiian shirt: this one blue, with a shitload of green parrots all over it. He is wearing pants this time: baggy khakis that end on a pair of Birkenstock sandals. Occasionally, he fidgets with his narrow little mustache, like he’s very proud of it.

  “It has no alcohol in it.”

  He licks his pencil-thin mustache. “Yes, because you said you were pregnant and couldn’t drink alcohol.”

  “But this is just fruit juice.”

  “It’s not just fruit juice. It’s got orgeat in it.” Orgeat, which he pronounces with the extra flourish: or-zhaaaaa.

  “The fuck is orgeat.”

  “It’s . . .” He laughs. “I don’t know.”

  He flags down a waitress, a bored goth girl who has discarded some but not all of her gothiness for a kitschy grass skirt and coconut bra. “What?” she asks, irritated. Miriam likes her.

  “What is orgeat?”

  “It’s almond syrup, with a little orange flower water and rose water. And a lot of sugar.”

  “Thank you,” he says, and she zips away.

  “So, it’s fruit-and-nut juice,” she says.

  “And flower water.”

  She sighs. All around her, a dark tiki bar in the Hollywood Hills: place called Tonga No-No. Everything is bamboo and palm fronds, tiki torches and pineapples. It’s cheesier than a yeast infection. Worse, it suddenly calls to mind the events of that day down in the Florida Keys. The tiki bar where Ashley Gaynes found her. He shot everyone in that bar that day—well, almost everyone. One of the survivors was Samantha, a young woman so affected by the trauma, it let the Trespasser in. It urged her. She met Louis. Got engaged. And where did that end? Oh, that’s right. Both of them dead, Louis by Wren’s hand.

  God, everything I touch turns to blood and shit.

  “We should go,” she says, frowning into her glass of fruit juice, almond nonsense, and flower urine. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “I just got my zombie. You’ll have to walk home.”

  “Yours has like forty-seven kinds of rum in it.”

  “Four, actually. White rum, dark rum, golden rum, and—” He scrunches up his nose, which leaves a series of V-shaped dents in his forehead. “Some other kind of rum.” He hums, giddily. “It’s good.”

  “Oh, I bet. I’ll be over here drinking this ball-less scrotum of a drink, this sad specter of a cocktail, this whim
pering cup of impotent tiki jizz.”

  “You do have a way with words.”

  She groans. “Being sober is bad, Steve. I see now why I never did it. It’s no fun. You’re exposed to—” She gestures toward everything. “All this. People. Objects. All the world and its endless disappointments.”

  “Sorry you’re pregnant. Is that a thing? Is that rude? I know that being pregnant is supposed to be a special thing, so . . .” His voice trails off.

  “It’s fine. It’s not rude. I mean, it is rude, but my threshold for rudeness is so high, you’d probably have to hit me over the head with a”—red snow shovel—“baseball bat before I thought it rude.”

  “How’d you get pregnant?”

  She stares at him, incredulous. “Well, Steve, when a man and a woman love each other very much, the man sticks his wangle-rod into her fleshy love-puddle and fills her with—”

  “No, I mean—you and your girlfriend—or wife? Is she your wife?”

  “Gabby?”

  “Sure.”

  “No, she’s not my—” Miriam laughs. “Wife? Wife. Oh, I don’t think anybody would ever want to be married to me.” In her head, she sees the peaceful solace of a snowglobe, gently shook up . . . “I mean, c’mon.”

  “So, girlfriend.”

  “Ahhh. Well.” She leans back. Is Gabby her girlfriend? No, of course not. Right? Wait. No? She hasn’t stopped to really think about that. They are fucking again. And it’s not like she’s getting sexy with anyone else. She stammers her only possible reply: “We don’t like to put labels on it.”

  “Is the baby a mutual decision?”

  “Oh, no. It wasn’t even my decision.” She sips the mocktail mai-tai and scowls like she just licked a subway turnstile. “I, uhh, thought my baby-maker had been ruined. Doctors told me it was done for, too much scar tissue from a violent miscarriage, and so I . . . did not expect this. But here we are. With me sipping from a cold glass of mockery-of-justice mai-tai.”

  “Who’s the father? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  She leans forward, planting both elbows on the table and staring over her two fists. “I met a man named Louis Darling. He was a truck driver. He was a big fella, a real sexy Andre the Giant type, and once upon a time, I saved him from a batshit Eurotrash drug dealer named Ingersoll—though he lost an eye in the process, earning him a pirate-like eyepatch, at least until he got a fake eyeball later on. Thing is, I didn’t really save him. I just . . . extended his time on Earth a little bit, which is maybe a favor or a curse, depending on how you view this world of ours, because before Christmas this past year, he got shot in the head by . . . a young woman I was mentoring, a girl named Wren who mistook him for something that he wasn’t. In a fit of confusion, she killed him, but only after he had put a baby inside of me. He’s dead. Wren is gone, escaped, in the wind—because I let her, which I probably shouldn’t have, but even now I realize she was caught up in something bigger than the both of us, and she was as much a puppet in that situation as I was. Not to say I’m not still mad. If I saw her today, I’d probably fucking kill her for taking Louis away from me. But at least he left something of himself behind, I guess. Now I just have to get this little fucker over the finish line and into the world safely. No easy task, if you’re me.”