Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  And especially to drive her ass around.

  She flicks the butt – a spiraling shape, an ember in the gray rain – and is about to roll up the window when she smells something.

  A chemical stink on the wind. Like a super-dose of cheap shampoo, like Garnier Fructis if it was first run through the bowels of a dead possum. It burns the eyes and Miriam suddenly feels overwhelmed, like the cab is pressing in on her, about to crush her like a bug in a soda can smashed by a human boot–

  She can't breathe. She feels cold.

  Her fingers curl inward. The nails bite into her palms.

  It hits her: I know that smell.

  She doesn't know it from personal experience.

  She knows it from the vision. The first vision. With Wren as an eighteen-year-old girl getting her head chopped off in a burned-out house.

  Sometimes her visions give her an olfactory sense. Other times, they don't. No consistency. Maybe she gets thirty seconds of the person's life. Maybe five minutes. It's whatever the vision gives her.

  Whatever the crow-headed monsters and ghosts inside her head allow.

  But now that olfactory memory is hitting her dead in the face.

  She swallows reflux and steadies herself enough to ask a question.

  "What…" Do not throw up do not throw up. "What is that smell?"

  "Heh?" the cabbie asks, apparently lost to the hypnotism of the road.

  "The smell. The goddamn… that chemical odor."

  "Oh. That? Sheez, yeah, I don't usually smell that anymore. Sometimes it washes over the town and I catch a strong whiff, but most of the time I just tune it out, you know?"

  She growls, "You don't tune out a smell, you tune out a – you know what, never mind, just what the fuck is it?"

  "The Sus-Q Color Plant." Sus-Q for the Susquehanna. "They do pigments and paints and stuff."

  He lives near that plant. Carl Keener lives somewhere near the Sus-Q color plant. He has to. She feels it scratching the base of her neck like a knife.

  "Change of plans. Head toward the plant."

  "But that's north, and you wanted to go west, to New Berlin."

  "Yeah. I get that. That's why it's called a change of plans. Just do as I ask, will you? Christ on a cookie."

  She feels close now.

  All the cells in her body hum like flywings.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Compound

  "Here!" she yelps, swatting the cabbie. "Pull over here."

  The cab tires grind on the broken earth of the road's shoulder.

  Rain runs down the cab window, distorting her view.

  Just the same, she knows what she's seeing.

  This has to be it.

  A dirt driveway empties off the road. A chain-link fence and gate block anybody from coming in. The top of the fence is ringed with clumsy coils of rusted barbed wire.

  Stuck in the earth and wired to the fence are signs. Pieces of plywood or scrap metal, the messages spraypainted in drippy, inconsistent lettering – some letters big, others small. All crazy.

  No Hunting!

  Num. #One God is Watching!

  LIAR GOD KNOW

  Is There Life After Deth? Intruders findout

  STOP OR SUFFER

  Do Not Go B-Yond This Fence

  And, of course:

  NO TRESPASSERS

  Trespasser. Miriam knows that word.

  Finally, the deal-sealer, the clincher, the Hail-MaryPraise-Jaysus: Seven ravens. Some perched on signs. Others atop the gate.

  Watching her.

  "Here," she says, throwing the rest of her money over the seat at the cabbie. Then she gets out. When the door opens, the birds stir, take flight into the surrounding trees and settle into the branches.

  Thunder complains overhead as the cab does a U-turn in the road.

  And then it's gone. Miriam is alone.

  The chemical stink hangs in the air.

  From here, she can't see much. Beyond the gate is just more dirt road. Dirt that's now churning into mud. Curving into the woods. In a strange way, it reminds her of the Caldecott School. Instead of a school crest, it's crazy person signs. Instead of iron gates topped with fleur-di-lis, it's a warped chain-link fence topped with razor wire.

  The razor wire, she notes, tilts inward. Not outward.

  It's not that he doesn't want people to come in. He doesn't want them to escape.

  Caldecott is a place where girls come for second chances. To learn and to grow.

  But here…

  This is a place girls come to have those chances stolen.

  To suffer and to die.

  A girl might be in there now. Dead or dying.

  No time like the present. Miriam throws her jacket over the coiled wire and begins clambering up the chain-link like a monkey. The jacket protects her from the bite of the barbs as she scoots over and lands on her hands and knees in the mud.

  She tries to rescue her jacket, but it's stuck up there. Shit.

  Can't worry about that now.

  She hoofs it, adrenalin puppeting her legs. The pit of her stomach is sour from bile and hunger. The muddy road sucks at her boots.

  The ravens follow her progress. Hopping from tree to tree. Silent black shapes behind the curtain of rain.

  As soon as she rounds the bend, she sees where Keener lives.

  It's a junkyard. Not a functional junkyard where people go. No, this is his dumping ground. Acres upon acres of worthless scrap and debris. A defunct Oldsmobile. A bunch of shipping containers and dumpsters. Plow blades, sheets of tin, machines and engines of unknown purpose.

  A school bus. A long school bus – not a Type-A – sits rusted among the mess. Not far from it is a little white house with black mold growing up the stucco like a stain creeping up out of Hell itself.

  As soon as she sees it, the ravens in the tree stir. They begin cackling and cawing in alarm, all seven of them taking flight into the rain–

  Miriam hears the sound of tires on mud.

  Quickly she darts into the junkyard and ducks behind a shipping container with corroded and partly caved in sides.

  A yellow short bus – a Type-A, like the kind you might see shuttling tourists or old people around – pulls up.

  Headlights beaming. Light capturing knife slashes of falling rain.

  For a while it just sits like that. She can't see who's in there. All Miriam can make out is a shape.

  Eventually the headlights darken. The driver cuts the engine.

  And finally she earns her first look at the killer without his mask.

  He's tall. Arms like corded ropes. Like in the vision. Older, too – Keener's in his late fifties, early sixties. A tall body stooped over. Shoulders up, head and sharp chin pointed down. Even from here she can see he's got dark eyes and a nose that sits – once broken, never set straight – off to the left as though he's perpetually pressed up against a pane of glass.

  Her breath catches suddenly.

  Oh no oh no oh no.

  He's got her jacket.

  She hears another set of tires. A cop car – state police – pushes in behind the school bus.

  A stark nightmare plays out in her mind: The cops arrest Keener, take him away, and then he's gone, out of her reach, locked away in courthouses and jails where she cannot touch him – and then he's released in time to kill again with nobody to stop him. Fate moving its pieces into place. To ensure that what must happen will happen.

  The cop steps out of his car, and it's like Keener's expecting him. The cop stands under a black umbrella but Keener, well, the rain doesn't seem to bother him.

  Keener hands him the jacket.

  The cop's a bulldog type. Shorter, squatter, a dark horseshoe mustache highlighting, rather than concealing, the chin-thrust of his underbite.

  She can't hear what they're saying. But they both turn toward the junkyard. As though they're looking for someone. Someone like her.

  Miriam pulls her head back behind the container. Holds her b
reath and squeezes her eyes shut as though that'll do anything at all.

  She listens to the rain. The murmur of voices. The low thrum of the cop car's idling engine and the thunder above moving across the sky.

  Then: tires on mud.

  Who is it now?

  This is getting to be a regular party.

  But when she looks, she sees it's not someone coming but rather, going. The cop turns around and drives back out to the road. Disappearing behind the trees. Miriam's not sure whether to feel sickened or relieved when he's gone.

  After all, the cop was looking for her. Wasn't he? Tipped off, perhaps by poor Bryan at the tattoo parlor. Why wouldn't he call the police? She had a knife-point at his neck and kept throwing Keener's name around like he was the target of a vendetta. Like she was going to hunt him down and kill him.

  Aren't you?

  The question pinballs around her head.

  Keener heads toward the house, but then stops halfway there. Peers around with his head on a suspicious pivot. Turns. Marches instead toward the maze of junk. Feet slapping against greasy mud.

  He's coming right for her.

  Quickly, she scrambles away from her hiding spot and to another – this time behind a dumpster filled to the brim with scrap wood.

  She stays her breath. Holds it. Don't pant like a dog, you bitch, he'll hear you. Keener found her old hiding spot. He's there. She can hear him and his footsteps. Can hear him grunt, kick the mud around. Splish splash.

  Here he comes again.

  She can't jump into the dumpster because it's full. Instead she presses her back against it and slowly works around the side. As Keener comes up the one side, she slides around the other, trying not to bang the metal and cause an echo.

  "Someone out here?" he calls. His voice is like two asbestos shingles rubbing together, like stone grinding on stone. "This your jacket?"

  Go away go away just go the fuck away.

  He starts moving around the dumpster. Toward her.

  She darts straight away, finds a rusted-out oncewhite Caddy and dives underneath it onto her belly. Her shirt pulls up as she does so, rainwater and oily mud sliding against her belly and into the waistband of her jeans. With anchoring fingers she digs into the earth and pulls herself all the way under.

  She looks behind her just in time to see Keener looking her way.

  Like he might have seen something.

  Like he's not sure.

  The monster wipes rain from his eyes.

  And starts heading toward her.

  Don't move. Grass, black with mud, hides her face, but just to be sure she presses herself deeper into the muck.

  Keener walks slowly. Like he's waiting for her to erupt from her hiding place, a deer spooked from the brush. So he can pounce and tear her apart. His face is feral. He hungers for a taste.

  He reaches the car.

  He's right here. Right on top of her.

  His work-boots, grimy steel-toes, are only inches from her head.

  Don't look under here.

  Her hand slides into her pocket. Pulls the springblade knife from her pocket. She hovers her thumb over the button.

  Stab him now, she thinks. Stick him like a pig. Will the blade puncture the boot? Does she have the leverage? What if she slips? Do it, this is your chance.

  But then he grunts again–

  And starts to walk away.

  Miriam lets out the breath she's been holding as he heads back toward the house, winding his way through the labyrinth of rubbish and refuse.

  She lies there like that, on her belly, for a while. Blood pumping so hard in her ears she's afraid she's having an aneurysm.

  But then, a new sound. Not footsteps, not a Keener grunt.

  A voice.

  A girl's voice.

  She can't make it out, but it's not far.

  Miriam crawls out from underneath the passenger side of the Caddy and hunkers down into a gargoyle stance – just in case Keener is looking. Stay low, she thinks.

  For a time, she just listens. Ear cocked. Trying to pull other sounds out of the white noise of the rain.

  Then she hears.

  "Is someone there?"

  A girl's voice. Close by.

  Miriam hurries forward, bent at the hip in a scoliosis run, and flattens her back against a rogue oak tree – a twisted living thing growing up out of this artificial wasteland.

  There. The voice, again: "Help me. Please."

  Small. Echoing.

  Across from Miriam is another shipping container: this one forest green, a company's logo long scoured away by Father Time and Mother Nature. This container is longer than the other. Twenty feet deep. Maybe more.

  The voice. It's coming from inside the container.

  He's keeping the girls inside them.

  It makes sense. In a sick fucking way. Hide them away from the world. Out of the house. But he sometimes brings them inside to do the dirty work, doesn't he? Or is that a change he makes? A change that arrives in the years to come?

  No time to worry about that now.

  Miriam dashes to the container. Puts her ear to the side. Taps on it with just her index finger – quiet enough not to draw any attention but loud enough that anybody inside would know it's more than the rain falling.

  She presses her ear against the cold metal.

  Hears: "Who's there? Hurry. Before he comes back."

  Miriam zips around to the front of the container – finds that it's open. The inside is dark, but she can make out the girl – barely, just barely, a shape shrunken in the back as though shackled there.

  "I'm here," Miriam says. "I'm here to help."

  One foot after the other, she creeps into the dark container.

  "Please," the girl says, sniffling, whimpering.

  "I'm coming."

  "Save me," she whispers. "Save me."

  And then the girl is up. Moving fast at Miriam: a white shape in black shadow, footsteps reverberating boom boom boom–

  It's then that Miriam sees.

  It's not the girl. Not even a girl.

  It's him.

  Keener.

  No time to run, no time for anything – she'll slip, fall, and he'll be on her. Instead she stands her ground. Flicks the button on her knife, the blade springing to life–

  But Keener's fast.

  He's got a weapon, too.

  A 2x4. Splintery. From the dumpster full of scrap.

  She screams, sticks the knife–

  –feels it sink into flesh–

  –he howls as the 2x4 connects with the side of her head.

  She goes down. Face up. The knife is gone – still stuck in Keener. She sees stars and snowflakes. Turns over. Hands and knees. Scrabbling forward.

  Hears him grunt.

  Hears her knife clatter against the ground.

  She crawls out into the rain. Gets her legs underneath her.

  Goes to launch into a run–

  But a hand with strong spidery fingers grabs her heel and yanks hard. Her leg goes straight and she falls, chest-down, into the mud.

  "Help me," Keener says, mimicking a girl's voice with eerie precision, not a swallow but a mockingbird. But then he lets his own voice take over, a growling tongue emerging from the girlish pleas. "You're a trespasser."

  Trespasser, she thinks. Help me.

  The 2x4 connects with the back of her head.

  And then it's mud and rain and nothing.

  INTERLUDE

  The Candy House

  Wham.

  Her mother drops a cardboard box on the ground in front of her. CD cases rattle within – Social Distortion, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. Above the CDs: comic books. Batman stares from the top, with Killer Croc in a headlock. Beneath that, a glimpse of Jean Grey from the X-Men. Miriam spies the bindings of paperback books she nabbed from the used bookstore down in Sunbury: Poppy Brite, Stephen King, Robert McCammon, Catcher in the Rye, Slaughterhouse Five.

  "This is trash," her moth
er says. Thumbs laced together. Worrying a piece of butterscotch candy between her teeth, rattling it from molar to molar. Worrying being the operative term: She only eats sweets when she's agitated.