by Chuck Wendig
Gabby’s eyes go wide.
The Trespasser freezes.
“What?”
“I learned from Harriet where our power lies.” She thumps her chest. “I can taste her heart. And now I can taste his. I’m not . . . very good at this yet but . . . Gabby, help, keep pushing—”
She can feel it now. The Trespasser, drawn to the surface of Gabby’s soul like an infection, like a parasitic worm summoned to the site of an injury—it is a black, vicious thing, roiling and diseased, angrier than any rage Miriam has ever felt. It nearly overwhelms her. Darkness grabs for her but she shoves it out even as sweat beads on her brow. Tears sting the corners of her eyes. She feels her bladder give out. It’s resisting her but she pulls harder, and harder, and harder—
“Nnngh,” the Trespasser hisses, and then Gabby’s head snaps forward sharply. In Gabby’s voice she yells, “Get it out of me get it out of me—”
I’m trying, Gabby, I’m trying.
Her own body tightens. Her skin feels like it wants to split. It hits her that this was too much, a task too great—eating Lukauskis’s heart was no easy task after she sent Steve away. She had to break one of his candles and use the glass shard to dig through his soft middle, under his ribcage, like a dog hunting for a bone, and his heart was tough and foul. She could feel his power surge through her but didn’t know what to do with it—and now she knows she’s not ready. He wasn’t ready either, and it’s going to rip her apart. A mad thought careens through her head like a ricocheting bullet: This is what kills my baby. I have made a choice to save Gabby, and in trying to save her, I’m going to kill my daughter, and worse, maybe she won’t even save Gabby at all, the price paid for nothing made—
Her fingers stiffen and splay out.
They begin to break one by one. Cracking and snapping.
Miriam tries not to throw up. She can see now the spiritual infection inside Gabby is surging out in oleaginous threads—like black oil in zero gravity floating in serpentine threads—
The tendons in her ankles, her Achilles tendons, snap like broken piano strings, and she falls to her knees. Blood trickles from her nose and she can taste it. Something wet trickles from her earholes, too. Blood. Maybe brains, ha ha ha, guess I can’t get any smarter now.
And then her arms bend back, the bones snapping, spearing through the skin, she cries out, and exerts every last bit of will she has—
A sound like firecrackers crackling, the air gone suddenly alive, popping, snapping, a deafening machine gun crackle.
Miriam slumps forward—
The Trespasser, a broken mirror—
A mind cast into a thousand pieces, each specter ripped from its brothers and sisters, torn from its flock—
Each inside a single tree swallow.
And all the birds take flight.
They turn into a seething, roiling funnel—whipping about like a downed power line—and this living conduit of swallows flies out the window once again, disappearing up into the sky. Miriam thinks for a moment to take them, to carry them to the sea and drown them. But you cannot kill the dead, she knows. And she hopes that the Trespasser is gone, torn from its mooring, its identity lost as each of its constituent souls has been given new, if temporary, life inside the flock of birds.
Psychopomps. Ferrying souls from the land of the living to the land of the dead. And perhaps back again.
Miriam collapses onto the floor.
She is broken all over.
Gabby slides down off the bed and curls up next to her. “I’m still dying,” Gabby says. “I’m still poisoned.”
“I’m pretty fucked up, too,” Miriam says.
Outside, a distant siren. Growing louder.
“Good thing,” Miriam says, “I called an ambulance before I got here.”
Then she and Gabby slump against one another.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
SIGNS OF LABOR
Time passes, as it must. As it wants. For time knows no other desire than to move ineluctably forward, and for Miriam, the fear is that it is moving forward to a place she doesn’t understand, to something that is far more mystery than clue, written as a sentence that does not end with period or an exclamation point but rather a tremendous question mark.
Today is her due date.
It is both the day her baby will be born and the day that fate has told her the baby will die. She can say with no certainty that she has changed that scenario at all. She feels like she has. She has great hope that the Trespasser was the one who was going to end the child’s life to save Miriam’s gift, and in casting the Trespasser to the wind—literally by throwing that fucker into a bunch of birds—she has saved her daughter’s life.
That’s the theory.
She knew then, that day in Gabby’s house, that the Trespasser was no more. Just as she has lost herself many times inside a flock of birds, so too has the Trespasser now lost itself. The spirits inside it have gone from one flock to another. She felt from those spirits a sense of satisfaction.
And loss.
And not just a sadness but a literal loss of self—who they were in life, and in death, and with the Trespasser, subsumed under the will of the flock. The ebb and flow of life. The migration and movement.
Again, that’s the theory.
“You okay?” Gabby asks her. She’s sitting by the hospital bed, reading a Kindle. She grabs Miriam’s hand and gives it a squeeze.
“Just fucking peachy.” They’ve told her she’s in the stages of early labor. Her water broke, which sent her here—despite it happening in all the movies, it’s apparently not a thing that happens in most pregnancies. And in fact, they told her they’ll have to break it again, because the kid’s head has since closed up the breach.
Everything hurts.
Her body still aches from that day at Gabby’s house. The ambulance came, pumped Gabby’s stomach, gave her some kind of charcoal shit to purge the remaining medications. And Miriam they said would be in traction and physical therapy for a long, long time.
She wasn’t.
She was on her feet the next day. She was eating a Five Guys hamburger the day after that with arms that had been broken only two days before. She mended. They called it a miracle. They wanted to put her on TV, but she told them to fuck off, please and thank you. Then it was back to Los Angeles, where she and Gabby resumed a normal life, the end.
Okay, not so normal, maybe. They had a lot to deal with, regarding the deaths of Richard Beagle and Abraham Lukauskis. Guerrero helped them through it, made sure they weren’t attached to any of it—but he said, given the pervasive nature of surveillance and broken privacy in this country, he couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t ever come up again. Their best insulation from that was the fact that both deaths happened relatively off the grid, far away from prying eyes. Fingers and toes crossed, it was never exposed.
Steve Wiebe did as Miriam said.
He’s already in Iceland.
Sometimes, he sends them pictures of him climbing around these big-ass black rocks and taking selfies in bubbling hot springs. Living his best life. His only life. A too-short life.
Now, here they are, in the hospital.
Miriam is trying very hard not to act worried.
But she is worried. I don’t want my daughter to die. They keep coming in, checking her cervix for dilation, which is about as fun as it sounds. (And none of the nurses seem to respond well to the Buy a lady a drink first, wouldja? jokes.) They tell her that once it dilates to a certain point, she’ll be in the active labor stage and then the transition phase, which leads to, well, a baby popping out of her. Except it won’t just pop out—she has to push it out, which sounds awful. And then if that doesn’t happen, they’ll have to do a C-section, which she damn sure doesn’t want. She’s not even sure if that’ll work, given her ability to, well, heal like she can.
Gabby says, “You’re worried.”
“Nope, I’m good,” she lies. “My asshole hurts, though. My literal butthole hurt
s really bad. And my back hurts. Can you rub it?”
“The back, not the butthole, right?”
“No kinky shit today, Gabs, just the back, yeah.”
She rolls over on her side, and Gabby brings out this dolphin-shaped back massager—she holds the dolphin and presses its smooth plastic fins and tail over Miriam’s back. It hurts. And it feels amazing. In part because it hurts.
“It’s okay to be worried,” Gabby says.
“I’m not—I’m not worried, it’s fine, I’m sure it’ll all be fine.” But she feels queasy with anxiety. “The baby will be okay.”
“The baby will be okay. You did it. You . . . saved me, and you will have saved your daughter, too. Okay?”
“Okay.”
But she doesn’t believe it.
Hours disappear under the weight of other hours. She knows the time is coming. She has that clock in her guts, in her blood. Time is ticking down. Gabby meanwhile wants to talk about it all—the birthing process, especially, which Miriam doesn’t want to hear about at all. Soon as Gabby starts talking about “mucus plugs” and “placentae,” she’s way the fuck out.
“I don’t wanna talk about the horrible thing that’s going to happen because I can’t change it. The fact that childbirth is a gory, grotesque purging of a human being is one fate I cannot change.” She winces. “Plus, I’m probably going to poop the bed. A lot of ladies giving birth poop the bed. That’s fucked up. We’re all born into shit, Gabby. And then when we die, a lot of us also shit again. It’s just a . . . a circular log-flume ride of shit.”
“It’s not . . .” Gabby sighs. “It’s not a log flume ride of shit. Life is good and wonderful and we are here, living it. You’ve literally created life with your body, and that’s some truly amazing shit, Miriam.”
That’s the other thing with Gabby—she’s really got a new lease on life. She’s almost disgustingly upbeat. Miriam hates it, or that’s what she tells herself. Truth is, she loves it. Or, at least, she needs it. It is the perfect counterbalance to her . . . well, usual attitude.
Like now.
The nurse comes in.
“Ready for your epidural?”
“Do you want the epidural?” Gabby asks. “You don’t have to—”
“Fuck that, I want it. We’re talking high-class drugs. I haven’t been able to have a drink or a smoke in nine months. God, they tell you not to eat lunch meat, Gabby. Ham! I can’t eat ham.” To the nurse she says, “Can you put ham in the epidural? I could really go for some ham. Or a hamburger. Oh, god, a hamburger.” She can’t eat during this entire labor process, nor does she really want to, because eating means making poop, and making poop means shitting during birth, which she decidedly doesn’t want to do.
“Speaking of that, I haven’t had lunch,” Gabby says.
“You’re leaving me?”
“Just for a few. Just while you get your epidural.”
“Bring me a hamburger.”
“I can’t, but I’ll eat one for you.”
“You’re a monster.”
“A wonderful, loving monster,” Gabby says, and kisses her on the forehead before fucking off out of the room.
The nurse, a white lady with a snarl of orange hair, hooks up IV fluids and then sends out for the anesthesiologist. He’s a chubby black dude with a big face and a big smile, and he hums and whistles as he gets her to lie on her left side. He says, “You know this goes into your spine, right? Spinal cord, specifically.”
“I don’t care if it goes up my ass, just get me some drugs.”
“Done and done,” he says.
And the needle goes in.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
LIGHT AS A FEATHER, STIFF AS A BOARD
She lies there for a while, waiting for them to come back and check on her. Waiting for Gabby to come back (her breath smelling like food, which will be the closet Miriam gets to actual food until this baby is out of her). Waiting for Dr. Shahini to check in—Guerrero made sure she was still on their health plan, which means she’s still with Shahini for the delivery. Waiting too for the pain to fade into the background, along with, she hopes, her anxieties. The baby will be fine. The baby will be fine. The baby will—if she says it enough times, maybe it’ll be okay—be fine.
She naps for a little while. Then she’s up again, her bladder suddenly sending off alarm klaxons. Her eyes pop open and she sees the bathroom door just a few feet away—she gets her own bathroom, la-dee-da, common to the birthing suites, not shared with some other rando. She notices too that the TV in the corner of the room is on: it’s showing some weird nature documentary about the Humboldt squid. All red tentacles and angry beaks. Teeming and seething in the Vantablack sea. She thinks, Okay, turn off the TV, go to the bathroom, then back in bed.
She reaches for the remote control.
Or, rather, she tries to. But she can’t do it.
She can’t move at all.
She’s breathing.
She can look around.
She tries to call out for the nurse—
But the only sound that comes out of her mouth is a dull, muted cry. A low, banshee whine. No, no, no, something’s going wrong.
Fuck.
This.
Whatever this is, it could be it. It could be what’s going to kill the baby. The epidural, it always had a risk—paralysis, right?—and now it might be affecting the baby. What if that’s what does it? Her stupid, simple primate desire for drugs in her system . . .
But it’s supposed to be safe. This is a hospital.
Oh, god, please don’t let this be the mistake . . .
The door to her room opens up, thank god, and in comes the doctor—not Shahini but a man, tall, thin but for his paunch, balding—
She makes the sound again, nnnngh, and he turns toward her.
“Miriam,” he says.
Emerson Caldecott.
He closes the door and locks it. He carries with him a small black case, which he sets at the edge of her bed. From it he withdraws a very familiar knife: the same hooked hunting knife used by Alejandro.
She wants to scream at him, You fuck, you fucker, get the fuck away from me, and what comes out of her is a desperate, piggish squeal.
He takes the knife and pokes the bottom of her foot with it.
“Good,” he says. “I snuck a little paralytic into your drugs—just to keep you nice and docile for this next part. Let me explain what happens next, Miriam Black. I’m going to reach in. I’m going to pull that child out. And then I’m going to cut its throat. You’re going to watch. You will watch the life come into this world and then go right back out. It will be recompense for my sister. It will be for Alejandro. Most of all, it’s because I want to do it. Because I enjoy it. Because you are a ruinous little slag. You will not be allowed to have a child. I will let you live a little while longer, though. I’m curious to see what happens to you after this.”
She tries to thrash, tries to will her body to do something, anything.
It fails.
He holds up the knife and then pushes her ankles apart forcefully.
“Mmmngh,” she says—not in a pleading way but in a warning, a dire warning that she wants to take that knife and use it to cut him into cubes.
“Are you wondering how I got in here? Did you not realize I was a doctor? I’m a surgeon, Miriam. I get to be the arbiter of life and death. Not you. You called me a common criminal back in my own home. . . .” He shakes his head, pulling up her gown, exposing her to him. “I am an upstanding citizen in the medical community. And then you show up, and you accuse me of things? You ruin my life, set the FBI on me? I save lives when I need to, and I take them when I need to. And if I happen to sell the organs here and there on the red market . . .” He reaches for her, then stops. “My god, that TV is so loud. Rudely loud. We can’t have a nice talk with that. And I want you to really hear the sound of the knife taking your child’s life. You won’t hear the thing cry. They don’t cry when they come right out; that takes
a moment. But I’ll kill it before it happens; you’ll see.”
He moves around the side of the bed to find the remote.
And as he does, the bathroom door clicks.
It gently drifts open.
A small, person-shaped shadow waits inside.
He turns to point the remote at the TV—
And Miriam Black steps out of the bathroom.
Miriam blinks—no. Not her. It looks like Miriam from days past: hair longer, still dyed jet black, the vented jeans, the white T-shirt. A doppelganger. A clone. Or just a wayward sister.
It’s Wren.
Caldecott freezes upon seeing her.
She has a gun in her hand. A large pistol—a .45 ACP, old, half-rusty, dinged-up. Caldecott looks from her to the gun and back again.
“Who might you be?”
“Someone here to square the circle.”
Then she shoots him in the head. The back of his skull paints the wall. Outside the room, screams rise up. Someone is already at the door, trying to open it. It shudders against the frame. Keys rattle.
Miriam can’t speak. She can’t move.
Wren steps over to her. She says, “I’m sorry. I know I can’t fix what I did. But at least I could fix this.”
Then she walks to the window and empties her clip into the glass, firing all over it so that no glass remains. Then she climbs out onto the hospital roof and is gone. Finally, the door pops open with the rattle of keys, and two police officers storm into the room, followed quickly by nurses and Dr. Shahini. Miriam doesn’t know where Gabby is. She can’t move.
But something inside her does move.
The baby.
EIGHTY-NINE
GONE GABBY GONE
For a long time, nothing makes sense. She’s wheeled away to another room. Shahini and nurses hover over her like a cloud of agitated flies. Blood tests come and they say she’s going to be okay, but the baby is coming. She starts to get her voice back and she asks them in slurred speech, “Where’s Gabby? I need Gabby,” but she knows what happened. Gabby is gone. Emerson’s first act was to find her. To kill her. To make sure he could do what he wanted to do and nobody would bother him. And she starts to cry even as they gather around and start to prep the room for the birth of the child. And she looks around at the nurses and—
