Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Louis draws deep breaths through his nose, like he's trying either to calm down or to build up enough psychic energy to kill everybody in the truck with his mind.

  "I belong with you," Louis says suddenly.

  "What?"

  "I've got a job. And it's to protect you." Another deep nostril-flaring breath. "I saw something."

  "You saw – what? Louis? What did you see?"

  "A bird. A crow."

  Miriam tenses up.

  He tells her everything. Not just one crow, but a whole road full of them – but only one that mattered. The crow that spoke with Miriam's voice. And then, from his eye socket, the feather. The muddy strands of hair.

  "The Trespasser," she says aloud without meaning to. Her inside voice let out of its cage.

  That means the Trespasser is real. Not kept to the prison of her own mind. Not merely an expression of her subconscious.

  "I've been seeing the Trespasser for a while now. I always thought it was just me, just a thing that's in my head, but–"

  "It still could be," Katey says. "Maybe what Louis saw was you… well, for lack of a better word, transmitting. Putting out a beacon."

  "That message is why I raced here," Louis says. "Katey might be right. Besides, The Bird did speak with your voice."

  Up ahead, the gates to the school.

  Nobody mans the booth this late – it's already 1 AM. Katey hops out, though, and heads to the stone pillar sporting the Caldecott Crest. She pulls back a brick to reveal a white-button touchpad.

  A few button-pushes later and the gate drifts open.

  They head toward the school. They pull up out front, and Louis kills the engine, but Miriam touches his hand.

  "No – you stay in the truck. Stay here just in case we gotta bolt. Katey's going to take me in because she has keys."

  Katey jingles a key ring and offers a sad smile.

  "I'm coming in," Louis growls. "I just got done telling you: I'm here to protect you. I can't let you go in alone."

  Miriam half-laughs. "It's a girls' school. A school full of girls. Okay, sure, one or two of them might know how to carve a shiv out of a bar of Dove soap but, by and large, I think I can take them."

  "Whatever psycho left that note for you could still be in there."

  "Dude, we're trying to go in there and not attract attention. I don't call you Frankenstein because of your taste in platform shoes. You're huge. We'll be fine." She says it, and she hopes she means it. It's not that she doesn't want to attract attention. It's that the truck cabas-confessional has made her a bit uncomfortable. She needs the space. He does too, she figures.

  He doesn't smile, but he nods. "Fine. Don't linger."

  "I won't."

  She thinks to kiss him on the cheek but then isn't sure – is that a mixed message? Does she even know what kind of message she wants to send?

  Instead, she salutes him.

  Then she winces and says, "I don't know why the fuck I just saluted you."

  He stares at her like she's a total moon unit. Which she probably is.

  Red-faced and confused, Miriam goes to join Katey at the entrance.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The Hall of Red Doors

  The girls' dormitory is a wing off the main house. Right now the main house is dark, all lines and shadows, but Katey knows where to go. As she stands by the door, going through the key ring, feeling each one by one, a sudden beam of light appears from the upstairs balcony.

  Miriam grabs Katey by the elbow, and pulls her down behind a wooden side-table sporting a coffee percolator and ceramic teapot.

  The beam intensifies. A shadow steps up to the balcony, then begins walking down the steps toward the lobby. The light bounces until it reaches the bottom. Then it drifts back and forth, searching, searching. Like the beam from a lighthouse.

  A radio squelches, and the shadow speaks.

  "I swore I heard something. Yeah. I'm in the lobby."

  Miriam knows that voice.

  Sims. AKA Roidhead.

  A voice chatters from the radio, but Miriam can't make it out. The other guard? Horvath?

  "Yeah," Sims says. Pause. "No, I don't see anything. Uh-huh, I'm heading back to finish rounds. And you better not have eaten my sticky bun again."

  Miriam's worst instinct is to blurt out a joke about two men eating each other's sticky buns, but for once wiser heads prevail. She feels a small surge of pride. Aw, baby's all grown up.

  Sims retreats back up the steps.

  Katey lets out a held breath and says, "I'm not sure we should be doing this."

  "We have to. Something real fucking goofy is going on, and I wanna know what it is. Please?"

  Katey nods. Goes back to the door.

  Finds the key. Opens it.

  Inside is a stairwell. All dark wood and dusty ochre carpets. Brass wall sconces sport white electric candles.

  Katey whispers, "Up here is the Dorm Mother's desk. Miss Betty. She walks rounds sometimes so I'm going to go distract her, just in case. Lauren Martin's room is on the third floor – room 322. You good?"

  Miriam's not good. But she nods anyway.

  And then Katey's off to the races, and Miriam's taking the carpeted steps two by two until she reaches the third floor. She pops open the door and peeks out: nobody. She creeps through.

  It's a hallway of red doors. More cherry wood, more moldy-oldie carpets that might as well be from a Victorian brothel, more of those brass sconces. Beneath the doors: a dark line. The girls are all asleep.

  Miriam darts along, looking for 322.

  The Rolling Stones in her head.

  I see a red door and I want to paint it black.

  There. Wren's room.

  She raps lightly on the door.

  The door flings open–

  Hands grab her and yank her into the dark.

  FORTY-SIX

  What Fate Wants, Fate Gets

  Miriam's hip slams hard into the corner of a dresser, rattling its contents. She's already reaching in her pocket for the knife when a pair of flashlights clicks on beneath a pair of chins.

  Lauren Martin and another moon-faced girl. She reminds Miriam a bit of the chunky one from Facts of Life.

  "Hey, psycho," Wren says.

  "Hi, psycho," the other girl says.

  "Okay," Miriam says, pointing at the roommate, "you don't get to call me that unless you want me to call you Fatalie-Natalie. You dig?"

  "You suck," the porky girl says.

  "You don't even know me, Fatalie."

  "Guys, shut up!" Wren hisses. "Miriam, this is Missy. Missy, this is Miriam. Shake hands and be nice."

  Miriam sticks out her tongue, but she offers her hand just the same.

  Missy, flashlight still under her chin, goes to shake Miriam's hand–

  The vision plays fast.

  Missy's lost weight. No longer the pudgy girl with the Karl Malden nose, Missy has thinned out, stretched long on the antique doctor's table.

  The song begins, "One Friday morn, Polly took ill–"

  Burned out walls.

  The man with the swallow tattoo and the plague mask.

  Funeral flowers, smoldering, smoking through nose-holes.

  The Mockingbird Killer sings.

  Missy struggles, crying, teeth scraping against barbed wire, flakes of rust snowing on her dry tongue.

  The axe rises.

  The axe falls.

  Her head does not come off entirely. The spine is severed but the rest of the meat must be cut away by wire cutter.

  The tongue comes out. Clip clip.

  The song ends.

  The Mockingbird laughs. Trill, trill, warble, trill.

  –and Miriam again hip-checks the dresser as she pulls away from Missy, her hand radiating pain from the X carved there and the deeper weirder pain of knowing that all this isn't over, that Keener isn't gone and the Mockingbird lives and girls are still going to die. And it's then she sees the ghostly skulls in front of both the girls' fac
es before the projections dissolve away to nothing.

  "Oh, shit, shit, shit," Miriam mumbles, holding both fists to her face and biting her knuckle so hard she thinks she might draw blood.

  How?

  How?

  Carl Keener. Not dead? She killed him. She didn't just kill him – she turned his throat into a sloppy hole. His body grew cold as she waited for Louis, as Annie Valentine sat trembling on the doctor's table, the wire pulled from her face, the leather straps unbound from her hands and feet.

  And yet, there he waits. In the future.

  Reborn.

  How could Keener come back to life?

  Suddenly nothing is certain. Everything is spinning like a top.

  Miriam's own life has never been rock-steady, never a solid bedrock of sanity, but the one thing she could count on was the truth of her visions. And she thought, after saving Louis, that she could save others.

  Was she wrong?

  Was that a one-and-done deal?

  Fate, it seems, has learned her tricks. It has moved to oppose her.

  Her mother's voice: It is what it is…

  I didn't save you," Miriam says to Wren, nearly breathless.

  "She really is psycho," Missy mumbles.

  Wren punches the other girl in the arm. "Miriam. What are you talking about?"

  "I didn't stop anything. You still die. I killed Carl Keener – I really fucking killed him – but he still kills you. And I don't know how."

  Annie Valentine with a bullet in her head.

  The fire, burning down.

  It hits her suddenly: In all the visions, the house and the bus have been burned. As the killer went to work on the girls, he did so surrounded by the charred walls of the house or the half-melted seats of the bus. But the fire just happened. After Keener's death.

  Possibly as a result of it.

  Keener isn't the only killer. He can't be.

  Suddenly there's a pounding on the door.

  She hears Sims's voice from outside. "Come out, Miss Black. I know you're in there."

  Damnit!

  Miriam snatches Missy's flashlight and points it at the window. The dark lines of iron sit beyond the glass. Can't get out that way.

  Wren pipes up. "There's no one in here! We're trying to sleep!"

  "We have cameras. You're not fooling anyone."

  Missy buries her face in her hands. "We're so going to get kicked out."

  Wren punches her again.

  "Stand back," Miriam says to the girls. "Go! Go to the window."

  What choice does she have? She opens the door.

  Sims stands framed by the doorway. At first Miriam thinks he's got a pistol drawn but then she sees the truth: It's a Taser.

  She hates those things.

  "Come out of the room," he says. "Slowly."

  "Okay. Okay. I'm coming, I'm coming."

  She takes a step forward. Then flicks her gaze over his shoulder.

  "Oh, you had to call your partner? Horvath, I take it?"

  Sims looks.

  It's a lie; nobody's there.

  But it's enough.

  Miriam flings the flashlight like a fucking tomahawk – it pivots through the air and cracks Sims between the eyes. The Taser goes off but Miriam's already out of its way. She slams hard into him, knocking him into the red door across the hall.

  Then she bolts. But he's on her like flies on shit. She can feel his heavy steps shaking the whole dormitory floor. She has to escape. Has to. This is no time to be caged, no time for cops or bureaucracy or any of that.

  Because the Mockingbird still lives, and as long as he lives, Wren Martin and those other girls are sure to die.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The Rustle of Wings

  It's hard not to make noise.

  The plan was to do this whole thing on the downlow, the QT, the No, officer, I wasn't breaking into a girls' boarding school to – hey, are those handcuffs?

  But that plan flew out the fucking window.

  She rounds the corner, sees a small table with a fake Chinese cloisonné vase on it – and she pulls the whole table over with a clatter.

  Ahead is the opposite stairwell.

  She reaches the door. Throws it open, darts through it.

  Then – stops and waits, hiding behind the inwardopening door.

  When she hears Sims come careening toward it, she smashes it closed at the last minute just as his head crosses the threshold.

  The door smacks into his cue-ball skull, sending him tumbling onto his ass.

  Then she bounds down the steps, leaping the banister as soon as she can do so without breaking an ankle. Every footfall sends jolts of pain across her soles and up her legs. By now she's sure she feels blood soaking her socks from the cuts on her feet but there's no time to think, no time to stop.

  From third floor to second, down to the first – already she hears him above, heavy feet plodding thumpthumpthumpthump, and she knows this guy's not going to give up.

  He's full of Red Bull and steroids, this fucker, and worse, he has an axe to grind. Sims isn't going to give up this chase. And it's not like she can go toe-to-toe with this guy physically. Before, maybe, if he wasn't expecting it.

  But now? When her hands and feet are cut up? And her head's like an overinflated kickball and it feels like her brain's rattling around her skull like the dice in a Yahtzee cup? Not a snow-cone's chance in Hell.

  She has to find a place to hide.

  The door ahead is marked by a plaque engraved with: CLASSROOMS.

  Much better.

  Shoulder first, she throws herself through the door and into the classroom wing. There the darkness is lit only by red emergency lighting.

  And immediately she sees a familiar sight: the cafeteria.

  There? She doesn't know the layout. Where to hide?

  Nearby, though… the gym. A big room. Plenty of places to hide: bleachers, whiteboard, behind big-ass medicine balls. Maybe even Beck's office.

  She keeps her head low and hurries along the wall (almost cross-checking a water fountain) just as she hears Sims throw open the door not twenty feet behind her.

  A flashlight beam sweeps the halls.

  The gym doors are ahead.

  The flashlight beam roves towards her.

  Only one shot at this if she moves now.

  Miriam pops her shoes off, leaves them where they stand, and she runs on the balls of her feet – pad pad pad pad ow ow ow – as the beam drifts toward her–

  She reaches the double doors to the gymnasium.

  No need to fling them wide. Just open a crack. Just like before.

  Slide in. Like a shadow.

  She lets the door ease shut just as the flashlight beam finds it.

  She prays Sims didn't see that.

  Miriam darts into the wide-open dark. Again a red emergency light helps illuminate the room, and suddenly she realizes: That light is above an exit door.

  Escape.

  She reminds herself to find the resting place of the architect who built this school and lay flowers and whisky upon his grave.

  Miriam darts toward the exit, but then sees something–

  Off to the far end of the gym, another light. White light. Framing the half-open door of Beck's office.

  Huh.

  She turns back toward the exit and a shape looms – suddenly, strong hands capture both of her wrists and pin them together, and she's about to cry out, but it's then she smells him: the simple scent of soap and sweat.

  Beck Daniels.

  "Miriam?" he asks.

  "Beck. Jesus. Beck."

  "What are you doing here?"

  Avert! Misdirect!

  "What are you doing here is the better question. It's like 2:00 in the morning, dude."