by Chuck Wendig
Gabby is there. Holding her hand. Telling her not to worry, just to breathe, just to go with it.
Not to worry.
Just to breathe.
Just go with it.
“You’re here,” Miriam says.
“You said I’m your wings, so let’s fly.”
“Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let’s fucking fly.”
NINETY
THE NAMING
The baby is a rubbery, purple thing. She has hair on her head and little fists that punch the air. They suction something from her mouth, and then she’s crying. Squalling like she was just taken from a very safe, very warm place—which, Miriam supposes, she was. They towel her off, plant her against Miriam’s chest, and Miriam holds her there.
She names the baby Louisa.
Lulu for short.
EPILOGUE
THE END OF THE WORLD
The truck is a piece-of-shit 1997 white Datsun, though it’s more red rust and spattered mud than white paint anymore. Miriam guns it down Uakea Road, past the Hana Cultural Center, toward the little schoolhouse—the Hana Arts Academy, where Lulu goes to Kindergarten.
In her gut is a breeding ball of snakes.
She doesn’t want to do this.
She doesn’t want to have this conversation.
It’s nothing, she thinks. It’s just bullshit. She heard you talking. Or she . . . she’s just being a silly little girl playing silly girl games.
It’s end of day, but before school lets out proper. She pulls up into the little parking lot by the school, a lot ringed by palm trees and black porous volcanic rock, and she sees Lulu standing there under the bamboo overhang. Mrs. Lee stands there with her, not much taller than the five-year-old. Lulu’s got her yellow galoshes on—not because she needs them but because she is obsessed with them, won’t take the damn things off except for bedtime—and her way-too-large R2-D2 backpack. It nearly dwarfs her, poor kid.
But she loves it, and it’s stuffed with art supplies and books and papercraft and also snacks. So many snacks. The kid is a snack addict.
Miriam pulls up, leaves the engine running. She gets out, hurries to meet Mrs. Lee. “I’m sorry I’m late—class ran long,” Miriam says. “You know how it is with the tourists.”
“Like chatty fucking magpies!” Lulu says in a cheerful, chipper voice. Mrs. Lee blanches, as she always does, and Miriam winces. But this is part of their arrangement: Lulu says naughty words because Miriam says naughty words, and as long as Lulu doesn’t say the naughty words in school, it’s fine. And now she’s technically out of school—if only by a few feet—so, the bad language is fair game.
Mrs. Lee sighs. “It’s fine, Miriam. Thanks for coming.”
Miriam gives the little girl a quick, eyebrow-arching look.
“You okay, kid?”
“I’m okay, Mama.”
“You’re going to talk to her?” Mrs. Lee asks.
“I’m going to talk to her.”
“Because this . . . it isn’t okay.”
That, said with the direst tone.
“I know. It’s just . . . a phase. Kids are kids. Keiki gonna keiki,” she says, using the Hawaiian word for children. Mrs. Lee isn’t Hawaiian, she’s Chinese-American, but she’s been here for long enough to go with it.
“It better be.”
“It is.”
Mrs. Lee bends down and gives Lulu a small hug. “See you Monday, Lulu Black.”
“Bye, Missa Lee,” and then she bounds into the truck. There’s no child safety seat—frankly, the truck isn’t safe for adults, either—and occasionally someone gives her shit about it. She just says her own mother’s words back to them: It is what it is. And then she drives off.
With Lulu in the car, Mrs. Lee says again, “It’s really not okay. She scared the other girl, you know.”
“Who was it?”
“Daphne.”
Daphne Stevens. New girl. Her mother owns the little bed-and-breakfast north of here on Kalo Road. The mom’s kind of a bitch, Miriam thinks but does not say. The kid’s all right, though.
Shit.
“I’ll handle it.”
“Good. And I’ll see you at yoga tomorrow?”
“See you at yoga tomorrow. Practice your crescent pose, all right?”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you, Mrs. Lee, and thanks again.”
And then she’s back in the truck and pulling out of the lot.
She chews her lip as she drives north, toward the little bungalow they call home. At the last second, she takes turn off a side road—Keawa Place—to the beach park there. “Where we going, Mama?” Lulu asks.
“Just to park. And to talk.”
“Talk about what, Mama?”
She thinks, You know what, but maybe she doesn’t. Five-year-olds sometimes have the memory of a goldfish. Worse, a goldfish you hit with a spoon to knock the sense of out of him, whack.
She pulls alongside the little park. Not far beyond it is a strip of white crystal sand and the sapphire sea beyond it.
Miriam tries to center herself. Be mindful, she thinks. It’s some bullshit she tells the men and women at her yoga class up at the Hana Honu Resort—she never in a million years thought she would teach yoga, but it helped her get past both the nightmares and the arthritis that’s plagued her since Lulu was born. So, much as she tells herself it’s bullshit, it’s really not. It helps her. Mind and body. (And all that shit.)
“I know what we’re gonna talk about,” Lulu says, and she says it in that very special Lulu way, which is I know something you don’t.
“Oh?”
“Uhhhh-huh.”
“And what’s that, Lulubear?”
The little girl reaches for the dashboard of the truck, past a busted clay pot and over a pile of receipts and drink cups—
She pops the ashtray.
Inside, a single wrinkled cigarette butt. Crushed like a crinkle fry.
“Busted,” Lulu says.
“It was just one.”
“Mama, you said you’re quitting.”
“And I am quitting. It’s a process.”
“Is not a negotiation.” That is a thing Miriam says to Lulu all the time when she doesn’t want to eat food or take a bath or literally do anything she’s ever told, so it’s not a surprise she’s learned to say it back to Miriam like a damn little parrot.
“Fine, yes, it’s not, and I’m quitting. I quit. It’s done. I already threw the pack away,” she lies. (Spoiler warning: it’s under her seat, and Miriam smokes one cigarette every week. Which she feels bad about. But it’s so, so, so good.) “We need to talk about what you said to Daphne.”
“Ohhh.”
Lulu gets quiet.
“Yeah, ohhh.”
“I didn’t mean to tell her that; I just told her because . . . I dunno.”
Ah, the logic of a five-year-old.
“Shit,” the little girl says.
“It’s okay.”
“Mama, are you mad?”
“I’m not mad, no, not at all, Lulubear.” She wishes she could have a cigarette right fucking now, though. She puts her hand on the little girl’s hand. “I just need to know: is what you told her . . . true?”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know?”
“Okay, I maybe know.” In a quiet voice she says, “I think it’s true, Mama. I’m sorry.”
She tries to walk the line between serious and softly sweet when she asks Lulu, “Tell me how you know, and tell me what you saw.”
Lulu puckers her lips and pops them—pop, plop, plorp—and then says, “We were painting turtle shells and then she bumped into me and I saw it. I saw her in the pool. I saw a . . . I saw a scary man in a jacket like my yellow boots push her in. And then he went in with her and held her there. And then she . . . she stopped moving.”
Outside, birds call and squawk. Miriam can do nothing with them. She cannot know what they are or see what they see. Just as she does not know how Mrs. Lee
dies. Just as she will not heal a cut, or a broken bone, or a pulled muscle any faster than anybody else.
But now . . .
Lulu . . .
Her heart drums with the surf.
“Lulu, are you sure about this?”
“I’m sure, Mama.”
“When does it happen?”
“Soon. A week is seven days?”
“A week is seven days.”
“Then it’s . . .” She holds up her fingers. “Three weeks, Mama.”
She tries not to look upset. She needs to keep it together, because if she doesn’t keep it together, Lulu won’t keep it together. “Is this the first time you’ve seen something like this?”
Lulu is quiet. Doesn’t answer. Shit.
“Lulu . . .”
“No, Mama. I seen it before.”
“With a lot of people?”
“Just some.”
She winces. “Me?”
Again, Lulu descends into silence. She stares, unblinking, not at her mother but at her boots, which she kicks into the glovebox. Whump whump.
Finally, Lulu says, “Yes. Do you want to know?”
Does she?
All this time, the one death she hasn’t been able to see is that one.
Her own.
Now all those doors are closed except one. Lulu can give it to her. Her little girl can open that door and show Miriam what she has never seen: how she bites it, sucks the pipe, takes the eternal dirt-nap.
“No,” she says, finally. “I’m okay, Lulubear, thanks.”
“Okay, Mama.”
Miriam swallows. “Daphne. Your new friend. She’s nice?”
“She’s real nice, Mama. She shares her smelly markers and I think that’s pretty fucking okay.”
“Pretty fucking okay, indeed. You want her to be okay?”
Lulu nods as serious a nod as a child can nod.
“Okay,” Miriam says. She thinks to the pistol in the fingerprinted safe under her bed back at the bungalow. She thinks about the man who cleans the pool at the Kalo Road B&B, and about his yellow rainslicker, and how he’s never seemed quite right to Miriam. White guy, pale, too pale for Hawaii, where everyone is tan like an oiled Bronze Age shield. (Everyone except Miriam, who goes from butt-white to lobster-red.) She doesn’t know his name, but she’s seen him around. And now, she thinks, he’s going to hurt a little girl. Drown her in the pool. That before doing who knows what else.
It kills her that this is happening.
Five years now away from all of it.
Here in Hana, on Maui, in Hawaii. End of the world. Away from it all. Like Guerrero said.
She can’t think too long about it or she’ll cry.
Instead, she forces a smile. “We’ll make sure Daphne is okay,” she says. “Mamabird has it covered.”
“Thanks, Mama.”
“Now let’s get you back to the house, little girl. Gotta get you cleaned up—it’s not a negotiation; don’t make that face at me—because Mama Gabby will be off her shift at the restaurant and we’re going to go out to dinner tonight for her birthday.” She leans over and kisses Lulu on the temple, then pulls her close as she wheels the truck back around the other way and heads back home. “I love you, Lulu.”
“Love you too, Mama. Is Daphne gonna be okay?”
“She’ll be okay,” Miriam promised. “We’ll make sure of it.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This is it.
Six books. A journey of many years and a great many vulgarities.
I have to thank you, the readers, first and foremost, because without you, these books don’t get to be here. You didn’t give me the first one, but you earned me the five that came after, and it’s only because of readers—fans and audience members who are willing to try out a new series before it’s finished—that penmonkeys like me can keep on keepin’ on.
Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, for believing in this character from the beginning, and keeping the series and its characters authentic and true. It was Blackbirds that got me in the door with her as an agent and so thanks to her for giving Miriam that chance—where a lot of other agents wouldn’t.
Thanks to Lee Harris at Angry Robot (now at Tor-dot-com) for bringing Miriam to life there, and then to Joe Monti for resurrecting her at Saga/S&S. When the first book went out on submission, we got the nicest possible rejections: “We love it, but we don’t know what to do with it.” So it’s great to be in the hands of publishers who want the books and who know what to do with Miriam. Thanks to Richard Shealy for being Miriam’s copy editor along the way, across all the books. Thanks also to Kevin Hearne and Delilah S. Dawson for letting Miriam play along in the Three Slices and Death & Honey collections.
Thanks finally to my wife, who believed in the first book enough to say that yes, we could take the chance on me trying my hand at this whole silly novel-writin’ gig, and as it turns out, her faith in me and in the first Miriam book were (thankfully) not misplaced. I’ve done all right, and she’s been my first reader on the Miriam Black novels since the first. People think someone like Miriam, with her foulest of mouths, could not exist . . . but they have not met my wife.
I’ll note this, too, as a final endnote to the series: we live in a particularly stupid-ass timeline, and I assume at this point that the Hadron Collider went awry and fucked shit up, and now we’re paying some kind of cosmic debt. We’re a country perched precariously on a needlepoint of a pin, and I don’t know what way we’ll fall, but I know a lot of us are mad as hell, as we should be. As such, there exists a current debate as to whether or not the resistance against the current administrative regime should dare to be (gasp) uncivil. Should we use naughty words in our criticism? Should we dare to stand up and stand in the way of our political foes? And the Miriam Black that lives in my heart says that fuck yeah, we should. Fuck the fucking fuckers. Fuck the fucking lot of them, and fuck them if they think they can shame us for our incivility while trying to bring a hammer of sexism and racism and ableism down on our democracy. Fuck that noise. Evil people want you to be nice, because when you’re nice, it’s nearly impossible to point out the evil that they’re doing. Fuck nice. Be more like Miriam. Speak truth to power, with as many nasty words as you can muster.
Thank you, you foul-mouthed, venom-hearted souls, you. Keep on keeping on.
Miriam would thank you, but she’s too busy giving everyone the middle finger.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHUCK WENDIG is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has also written comics, games, and for film and television. He’s the author of more than twenty novels, including the Miriam Black series, Invasive, Zer0es, and the Star Wars: The Aftermath Trilogy. He is the cowriter of the short film Pandemic, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. He currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, son, and two dogs. He can be found at terribleminds.com and on Twitter at @ChuckWendig.
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ALSO BY CHUCK WENDIG
THE MIRIAM BLACK SERIES
Blackbirds
Mockingbird
The Cormorant
Thunderbird
Interlude: Swallow (novella from Three Slices collection)
The Raptor & the Wren
Interlude: The Tanager (novella from Death & Honey collection)
STAR WARS: THE AFTERMATH TRILOGY
Star Wars: Aftermath
Star Wars: Life Debt
Star Wars: Empire’s End
Zeroes
Invasive
ATLANTA BURNS SERIES
Atlanta Burns
The Hunt
THE HEARTLAND TRILOGY
Under the Empyrean Sky
Blightborn
The Harvest
NONFICTION
The Kick-Ass Writer
: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience
Damn Fine Story
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An imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. + 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020 + This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. + Text copyright © 2019 by Chuck Wendig + Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by Adam S. Doyle + All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Saga Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 + SAGA PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. + For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. + The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. + Also available in a Saga Press paperback edition + First Saga Press hardcover edition January 2019 + Jacket illustration copyright © 2019 by Adam S. Doyle + Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data + Names: Wendig, Chuck, author. + Title: Vultures / Chuck Wendig. + Description: First Saga Press hardcover edition. | London ; New York : SAGA Press, 2019. | Series: Miriam Black ; 6 + Identifiers: LCCN 2018022465 (print) | LCCN 2018024534 (eBook) | ISBN 9781481448772 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481448789 (paperback) | ISBN 9781481448796 (eBook) + Subjects: LCSH: Psychic ability—Fiction. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Occult fiction. | Horror fiction. | Suspense fiction. | LCGFT: Thrillers (Fiction) + Classification: LCC PS3623.E534 (eBook) | LCC PS3623.E534 V85 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022465
