Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  “You’ll be fine,” Evelyn always says. “You’ve got that Black spirit.” That meant to be an evocation of their bloodline, somehow, but also in it Miriam finds a troubling echo: that black spirit.

  The Trespasser.

  She looks for the Trespasser.

  In mirrors, in window reflections. She looks outside in the woods, expecting to see him standing there in the trees, along the road, one eye gone, worms squirming in the hole.

  When she goes back to school, she looks for him there, too. In lockers. Behind the teacher. In the bathroom, listening to the sink to see if she’ll ever hear a whisper come up through the drain. There in the bathroom, too, she finds the place where she was attacked. Where she almost died. The floor is clean. Her blood is gone. No sign of the incident remains. At least, no physical sign. She still isn’t walking quite right. And the kids at school don’t wanna talk to her at all. It’s like she’s cursed in a whole new way—a pariah, an exile, flung to the margins because of what happened to her.

  She visits places where she remembers things happening.

  The living room where Bird of Doom broke through the window.

  The bedroom where she found Grosky’s severed head.

  The road outside their house where she walked, taking a bus on a journey away from the Mockingbird killer, to a house she had vacated.

  She tries sometimes to contact birds with her mind. To control them. They don’t care. They fly away, tweet-tweet-tweet.

  She uses the Internet to look up things:

  The Mockingbird killer.

  Louis Darling.

  Ingersoll, Ashley Gaynes, something, anything.

  Nothing. Nothing meaningful, anyhow.

  Miriam sinks into a bleak depression. She begins to accept that none of what she remembers is real. It was just a delusion. Could be that it was her mind protecting her from the truth. Or maybe it was just a chemical by-product of her then-dying brain. A brain that came back from the dead.

  (Six times, she thinks in a voice that does not belong to her but rather to a madman mystic that is likely not real.)

  Eventually, she floats through life, day in, day out. Her depression is a functional one; she isn’t buried underneath it, but she recognizes it as the real Trespasser here, a black spirit that accompanies her wherever she goes.

  Soon, school is over. She graduates.

  Her mother takes her out to a dinner. Garibaldi’s, an Italian place about ten minutes from their house.

  It’s there that Miriam makes an important decision.

  EIGHTY

  THE IMPORTANT DECISION

  Miriam decides that after this—soon after this, maybe as soon as tonight after dinner—she’s going to leave. That’s it. She’s done. She has no idea if that will fix the way she feels or not, but what she knows is that the life she lived while inside the coma was a far more interesting one than she is about to live here. Life in this space will be normal. It will be peaceful. And it will be as dull as a butter knife, and just as useful.

  She wants a sharper, meaner life. Something with teeth.

  Something that can cut.

  And so she decides, that’s it.

  She’s leaving, just as the Miriam inside her head had done. She’s going to run away from home just as that Miriam did. That Miriam was way more fucked up. But that Miriam was way cooler.

  Off she goes. But first, this dinner.

  She and her mother eat in relative silence. Evelyn seems distant. And Miriam is certainly distant. Both have drifted so far apart from one another that they might as well be on different continents at this point.

  Miriam eats spaghetti with meatballs. Comfort food.

  Evelyn eats a salad.

  They get the garlic knots, because the garlic knots are one of the few truly good things in this world. Her mother, despite the salad, taught Miriam to put butter on them. They’re already soaked in olive oil, but the butter makes it fattier, tastier, and somehow even more garlicky. So, they both do that, taking their butter knives and spreading butter in there.

  Evelyn orders an iced tea. A rare thing for her: caffeine.

  Miriam remembers briefly a version of her mother down in Florida, in beachwear, smoking and drinking. And now Miriam decides she’s going to do those things. Once she’s on the road, she’s going to smoke and drink.

  Maybe she’ll go to Florida.

  She hated Florida in her dream, but she wants the chance to hate it all over again. It only seems fair.

  “Did you ever smoke a cigarette?” Miriam asks her mother.

  “What?” Evelyn asks. “No. No, of course not. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Did you drink?”

  “Miriam, no.”

  “Not even a little? Margarita. Mai-tai. Something like that.”

  Evelyn eyes her up. “Good girls don’t drink.”

  “Were you always a good girl?”

  “Of course I was.” Then her mother’s mouth fishhooks a little, itty-bitty smile. The hint of a smile. The ghost of a smile. “Usually.”

  Then her mother takes her straw, unwraps the paper wrapping halfway, and blows into the one end of the straw. The paper wrapping around the straw fires off like a crinkly rocket and strikes Miriam dead in the center of her forehead. Ptoo. Fwhick.

  “Mom!”

  Evelyn smiles. “What?”

  “Mom, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “What can I say? I have a few tricks left.”

  Miriam freezes, mid-laugh.

  What can I say? I have a few tricks left.

  Me too, she yells.

  Wanna see one of mine? he asks.

  Bring it on.

  Then, lickety-quick, Not-Louis is gone. One minute, she’s face-to-face with him, smelling his sour stink, and the next—he’s vapor. The shadow tendrils disappear too. The shaking has ended. The road behind is whole once more, as are the trees all around. None are broken. None have fallen.

  Once more, all is silent and still.

  A few lone flurries fall.

  The silence ends as a gunshot fills the night.

  “Miriam?” Evelyn asks.

  Miriam unfreezes. She palms a garlic knot. Idly, unconsciously, she spreads a little butter onto it.

  Then she takes her butter knife and jams it into her mother’s eye.

  It buries deep. Miriam lends it extra strength as she uses the heel of her palm to really cram it in there good. Evelyn screams bloody murder, backpedaling out of her chair, the iced tea spilling, and Miriam realizes she’s made a terrible mistake. The vision of her in the coma felt so real, so true, that she thought maybe this was it, this was the moment—

  Evelyn turns and looks at her. The knife sticking out of the one eye like a shining lever.

  “I pushed it too far,” Evelyn says.

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t help myself. I thought I would be funny. I wanted to amuse myself. But I broke the wall. I disrupted the illusion.”

  Ocular fluid oozes off the knife blade like jelly. Clear jelly. Like the kind you’d spread on a pregnant woman’s belly before the ultrasound.

  Evelyn takes a plop of it and pops it in her mouth. Suckle, suckle.

  “You,” Miriam says.

  Worms squirm through the ruptured eyeball, curling around the butter knife’s handle like ivy around a flagpole.

  “Gotcha,” the Trespasser says, showing a pair of jazz hands. It’s Louis’s voice, out of Evelyn’s mouth. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag, huh?”

  EIGHTY-ONE

  SHOW’S OVER FOLKS, THIS WAY TO THE GREAT EGRESS

  “You fucker,” Miriam says. She looks down at herself: she is the teen version of herself no more. She’s back to the Miriam who came to Black Star Canyon, with the vented knife-slash jeans and the white T-shirt and hair dyed the color of monster blood.

  Her mother, now with a clot of maggots pushing out of the socket, the larvae plopping to the floor in wet clumps, chuckles a deep, rheumy chuckle. Ag
ain, Louis’s voice comes from her twisted lips: “I had you. I had you going, but I went and ruined it, didn’t I? I just had to get greedy, get tricky, say a little thing—What can I say? I have a few tricks left. Well. Shucks. We all play with fire sometimes, don’t we, Miriam? But this time, I got burned. It doesn’t matter. Not like I could keep it up forever, anyway. The illusion must end eventually.”

  All around, the walls of the little Italian joint are beginning to rot—decaying as if in fast-forward. Moldering. Cracking. Water stains spreading across the ceiling like a growing darkness.

  Miriam is pissed.

  Inside her is a pyroclastic channel of magma-like rage.

  But with it comes clarity.

  And triumph.

  “I’ve got you,” she says, grinning wickedly. “I saw through your bullshit. And now here we are.” She holds up her arms, and now the walls are crumbling apart. Beyond them: black feathers. Shifting, flexing, like a blackbird, breathing. They are night-touched and moon-slick. Soon, the restaurant is gone entirely, and they’re standing there on nothing—no, floating there in the feather-bounded black.

  “So sure, are you?” the Ghost of All-Dead asks.

  “You’re mine now. I control this space. I control this animal. And all I have to do is—” She holds up her hand, fingers and thumb just apart, poised to snap. “Kill the bird. Then I’m out. And you’re dead.”

  “I’m already dead, precious girl.”

  “The dead can die.”

  “The dead cannot die. It is perhaps the one bonus we get.” Her mother floats around Miriam in a wobbly orbit, her arms extended out to the sides as if demanding for all to see this place. She never turns her one-eyed gaze from Miriam. “Whatever that fuckhead urban shaman told you was a lie. He . . . misunderstood the situation. And now he’s dead.”

  Blood begins to ooze in through the feathers all around them. It pushes up around them, threads of red like hungry nightcrawlers. It dribbles and runs in crooked rivulets, saturating the void.

  “He’s not dead,” Miriam says. “Another trick of yours.”

  “Whose blood do you think that is?” Not-Evelyn says, using Not-Louis’s voice. With every word she speaks, the entity’s voice grows louder, and the body swells and distorts, growing larger. “It’s his. I’ve killed him. While you sat trapped in this animal, lost to the illusion I’ve given you, I’ve been busy. I am the Ghost of All-Dead. I am not one spirit but hundreds. You cannot summon me and trap me in this sorry animal. I am legion. For we are many. And we’re hungry, Miriam. Hungry for justice. Hungry for some fucking recompense. Lives, stolen, ended without thought by a callous, uncaring universe. You were our way back in. You helped us. You saw the depredations of fate; you felt in your bones that what happened to you wasn’t fair, wasn’t right, and it wasn’t. You wanted to fix it. To conquer it. Just as we want to conquer life. We want to end death. Is that such a terrible thing? Would it be so bad, to shatter that cycle and let all live, endlessly, eternally, on and on and on? No more death. No more lives cut short just because that’s the way it must be. I see a better world.”

  By now, the Trespasser is consuming the voice—the skin of her mother’s body has split like the skin of a steamed tomato, showing a glistening tangle of tendons braided with eels braided with fraying rope. The flesh of the face is in tatters, revealing a black, oily skull underneath, and the dead, dread eyes of a raven. The teeth are not teeth but individual beaks, dozens of them, hundreds, lining up like the pickets of a fence, clattering like hungry little baby birds, clack-clack tick-tack.

  “No,” Miriam says. “Death is a balance. That’s why when I saved a life, I also took one. That’s how it works.”

  “It works like I say it works,” echoes the spirit’s shrieking voice, but in that voice, Miriam hears something: desperation. And stranger still: uncertainty. It doesn’t know that Miriam is helping to break a cycle. It believes it, yes. It has faith. But that faith isn’t unshakeable. And now Miriam wonders: how much of what Emerson Caldecott told her is true? How much of what the Trespasser says is true? What if they’re wrong? What if they believe a thing, a false thing, just as most people do? People are fallible. And the Trespasser, the Ghost of All-Dead, is no alien, no demon. It’s human too. And humans are fucked up.

  Not that any of it matters now.

  Whatever this thing is, whatever it believes, it has to go.

  Miriam reaches into the bird’s mind, finding it somewhere beyond all of this—it’s a pulsing, nervous thing. It’s scared. It’s hurt.

  It wants to die.

  Miriam feels sad for it.

  And, in a way, she feels sad for the Trespasser, too.

  But all this must end.

  “It is what it is,” she says.

  And she snaps her fingers.

  And breaks the bird’s neck.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  THE ERROR OF YOUR WAYS

  Back to herself she goes. Like being thrown from one temperature extreme to the next: like jumping from a pot of boiling water into the depths of a frozen lake. It’s bracing. She leaps to her feet like she’s been given an electric shock. She feels for her stomach: she’s still pregnant, and she can feel her daughter tumbling around in there. Agitated. Upset. Same here, kid. Same here. Miriam stops, looks around—

  Carnage. All around.

  All of Abraham Lukauskis’s icons and objects have been destroyed. Little bird bones scattered. Candles, shattered. A saltcellar, broken open, the salt scattered on the ground like snow—

  (Snow from a broken snow globe)

  And in the middle of it is a body.

  Gabby . . .

  No. It’s him. It’s Lukauskis.

  He lies slumped in one of the big, rusted pipes, propped up against its inner curve. His right eye is wide open. His left eye has been replaced.

  It has been replaced by the raven.

  It is an impossible, unpleasant fit—the bird, too big for the socket, has still somehow been pushed halfway into his skull. Its little legs hang out the back, curled up into arthritic hooks. His skull is swollen, as if to accommodate its too-big raven’s body. His mouth hangs open. The lips are ashen, and his tongue lies out on the lower lip like the head of a resting snake. Abraham Lukauskis is indeed dead.

  Gabby is nowhere to be found.

  Miriam spins around, looking. She hopes like hell she’ll see Gabby there, coming back through the brush, dazed and dizzied—but she knows what she’ll see instead. She’ll see Gabby’s body, broken and ruined, hanging in a tree like a broken, captured kite.

  But that, she does not see, either.

  Miriam calls for her. “Gabby! Gabby.”

  Nothing.

  But she hears something.

  A gassy hiss. A wet, gabbling murmur.

  She turns slowly to see that Abraham’s jaw is opening and closing, creaking and grinding in crass cavitation as it does. The hiss emitting from his throat becomes words, even as his one dead eye stares up at nothing.

  “We are kinnnn, you and I. . . .” the voice says. It’s Lukauskis’s voice, but she knows to whom it truly belongs: The Trespasser. “Abraaaham is with us now. He has seen the p-p-power of the All-Dead. And soon Gabby will joiiiiin usssss too—you muuuust be shown the error of your ways. You mussst be punished. Her t-t-time hasss c-c-come. . . .”

  Miriam picks up a rock and throws it at Lukauskis. It thuds dully off his forehead, then clongs as it lands in the pipe.

  The jaw stops moving.

  The words cease.

  Miriam cries out. She sees now that the sky is starting to brighten just a little—the faint promise of sunrise. But with it comes no hope and, instead, the realization that she’s been out here for hours. Hours trapped in the mind of a bird, lost to the illusion the Trespasser gave her.

  The trap wasn’t for the Trespasser. It was for her.

  And now, she fears, it has Gabby. It’s taken her.

  Nearby, she hears the crackle of brush. Someone’s coming.
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  “Gabby?” she says in a smaller voice, then again, louder: “Gabby!”

  The brush parts, and Steve Wiebe staggers out. The side of his face is crusted with a half-mask of blood. “Miriam,” he says. “Gabby . . .”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She . . . hit me with a rock.” He reaches for the top of his head with a ginger touch and winces. “Last thing I saw before passing out was the taillights of my car as it drove away.”

  It feels now like she’s in free fall. She let this happen. As with so much, when Miriam intervenes against fate, it only lets fate sink its teeth in deeper. Over time, she learned to change that by killing those who would rob others of life—that seemed to break the circuit. But the Trespasser was right. You couldn’t kill it. You can’t kill the dead. So, what, then?

  The realization hits her like a bullet to the head.

  They’re nearly there—it’s nearly to Richard Beagle’s death. Never-Dick dies by Gabby’s hand. His time is almost up.

  Gabby kills him. So, that’s where she’s going.

  “I need you to go,” she tells Steve.

  “Go where? We can go together, Miriam—”

  “Not yet. Go, get a signal, use your phone—you still have it?”

  He nods and holds it up.

  “Good,” she says. “Go, get a signal, and call Guerrero. He’ll help us.”

  “And what are you going to do?” he asks her.

  She surveys the scene.

  “I’m going to clean this up,” she lies.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  COUNTING WORMS

  Once again, time is the enemy. Fate as the end, time as the road that leads there. All efforts to intervene have failed, and now Miriam sits, ten hours after waking up next to Abraham Lukauskis’s body—ten hours after losing Gabby to the very spirit she hoped to forbid from taking her—waiting for this fucking plane to take off.