Mockingbird

by Chuck Wendig

  "And what is it that you do, Miss Black? A life for a life. We both step into the stream and let our bodies change the direction of the water – we redirect fate. By ending some lives we save so many others."

  Miriam feels the Xs in her palms itching. She needs to do something. Soon.

  But not yet.

  "You could just kill them. The bad girls. But oh, the theatrics. You don't only put a bullet in their heads. You make a… presentation out of it. A ritual for all the bullshit gods and non-existent goddesses to see."

  "Ritual is necessary," Beck says.

  Eleanor says, "My gift is from the divine. We must celebrate it in all its aspects. I'm surprised you don't feel the same way. Don't you believe in things greater than yourself?"

  "I don't believe in freaky folk songs and fucked up medical masks."

  "The song is our prayer. It's an old song. Carl's mother used to sing it to him." Eleanor offers a strained smile. "The mask is both symbol and function. The beak doctor's mask was the face of the bird – the plague affected mammals, you see, but not birds. And so with the herbs in the beak the doctor was protected from catching the plague. The plague was more than just sickness back then. It was thought to be a mark of sin. A punishment by God."

  "Fuck. Who taught you all this?"

  "My father was an academic. What can I say? His florid imagination was infectious."

  "These girls. Why not just… help them? Offer them a chance? You say you have the power to sway fate – so why not show them how to be better people? Instead of torturing them. Killing them."

  "That is what we do," Eleanor says, as though Miriam should have this figured out already. "It's why our schools exist."

  Oh, god. "Schools. Plural?"

  "We have four schools in three counties. Caldecott. Woodwine. Bell Athyn. And Breckworth. Three through dummy corporations, but I serve on the board of each school, as does my son Edwin."

  Miriam doesn't want to ask. Doesn't want to know. She already feels sick to her stomach. But that urge to know, to see, is present – the same urge that makes her put skin to skin so she can see the most intimate and troubling moment of a person's life.

  And so she asks, "How many? How… many girls? How many victims?"

  Eleanor says to Beck, "Show her."

  Beck waves her on.

  He leads her past the ficus. Down a row of white orchids, flowers like white spiders.

  At the end of the row, a metal cabinet. Rust at the hinges and edges.

  Beck puts his hand at the middle of Miriam's back (not the small of her back, thank all the gods) and his touch makes her feel queasy and unstable, like she's tuning in to some nauseating frequency.

  He pulls a small key. Unlocks the padlock. Opens the cabinet.

  Inside?

  Jars.

  The cabinet is filled with jars.

  Five shelves. Easily a dozen on each shelf.

  Each containing cloudy fluid. Turbid, like brackish pond water.

  In each, something that looks like a slug or a sea cucumber. Lean at one end. Fibrous at the other, like the root of a stubborn weed.

  Tongues.

  In each jar, a girl's tongue.

  She wrung her hands and groaned and cried

  And gnawed her tongue before she died.

  Miriam doesn't want to do it, but she has to.

  She plucks a jar from the top shelf. Nothing identifies to whom it belongs. No tape. No name. No date. The jar shakes in her grip. Bubbles long-clinging to the mouth meat flutter to the top.

  "What do you do with the bodies?" she asks, though she's not sure she wants to know.

  Beck reaches over into a pot where a bromeliad the color of fire blooms. He fishes out a fistful of earth and holds it in front of her.

  Moist earth, rich as pipe tobacco but speckled with white – like shards of finely shattered pottery – tumbles to the earth.

  No, no, no, no.

  "We compost," he says.

  Black dirt. Bone shards. Headless corpses feeding lush plants as fertilizer.

  "So many dead girls." Tears creep down her cheeks.

  "They needed to die. You'll see that."

  "I'm not like you."

  "My father proves otherwise. You're a killer, Miriam."

  Go get 'em, killer. You have work to do.

  An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

  A life for a life.

  You are who you are.

  "So be it," she says, and she bows her head.

  Then she whips the tongue jar around and smashes it against Beck Daniels' head. The stink of formaldehyde blooms fast, and he staggers to the side. Bits of glass stick in his temple, his cheek, that prodigious jaw. An archipelago of shards around his eye socket.

  Run!

  She shoves past him–

  But his knee comes up and nails her, a hard hit to the kidneys. She falls forward, cracks her head on a table edge. A pot spins off the side. Dirt – grave dirt, the dirt of dead girls – rains down on her.

  She tries to get up, but he grabs her and throws her down.

  Pins her.

  Flips her over.

  His hands close around her neck.

  Blood pulses in her cheeks, lips, eyes.

  He bangs her head against the concrete. Once, twice. Shotgun blasts of stars.

  Her palms slap against the ground. She slides one hand beneath her as his thumbs press hard against her windpipe.

  She feels the waistline of her jeans, fingers searching blindly along the small of her back.

  Where is it where is it where is it

  Beck leers above. Glass glittering in his face. Blood oozing to the edge of each shard, dripping down on her face – pat pat pat.

  Darkness rips away the light.

  Her hand, still searching.

  Then–

  She finds it.

  The fork.

  She made a big deal about that butter knife from breakfast. Waving it this way and that. Beck's earlier words echo in her head.

  "Your words, your attitude, all a big misdirection. A magician's trick."

  Misdirection, indeed.

  They watched the knife. They missed her tucking the fork into her pants.

  Her hands curl around the utensil.

  She brings the fork up hard–

  And jams it deep into the soft meat of his armpit.

  Release. Light pushes back the darkness as his hands loosen. Miriam gets her knees up against his midsection, extends her legs, pushes him off her as he howls in rage, pawing at the fork like a bear.

  Miriam finds her feet beneath her.

  Still woozy.

  Will-o-wisps still dancing in front of her eyes.

  A small gust of pride swells within her: Second sonofabitch I dispatched with a fork.

  She bolts. She knows that staying to fight Beck is a losing battle. A broken jar and a forked armpit will slow him down, but he's easily the superior fighter. And going toward Eleanor – she's an old woman and Miriam's sure she can take her but doesn't want any surprises.

  That means going out the window.

  Miriam gets a running start.

  Foot up on one table–

  Launches herself at the Plexiglass.

  Her shoulder hits it. The window bends inward, pops out of its frame, and takes her with it. Suddenly it's all wind and rain and the great outdoors. Miriam runs.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The Devil Drives a Black Mercedes

  Louis shivers in the rain, the cop's gun tucked in his waistband.

  Everything here at the school is lit up like a carnival. Red and blue lights strobing, disrupting the wan light of morning. He hides behind an alcove corner, peering out, unsure what to do, where to go. His head is a dozen cats running in a hundred directions – he doesn't know how to find Miriam, doesn't want to talk to the cops because if one of them is in on these murders then many might be, doesn't like being this close to a parking lot full of cops with a stolen police revolver in his
pants. He's paralyzed. Some protector.

  Water rushes down the school gutters, overwhelming the drains. The streets are wet at the sides, and soon those deep puddles will meet. It won't be long before all of it floods. The rains are endless and without mercy. Hurricane Esmerelda is here – and she's showing her teeth.

  By now, some of the cop cars are leaving. Soon they'll all be gone.

  A shadow falls over him and above him, the airy fwump of an umbrella unfurling. It's Katey.

  "Louis, I'm so sorry." She's been crying. "I left her alone and then… The next thing I knew, all hell was breaking loose. This is my fault."

  "Your fault." He almost wants to laugh. "Katey, I told her I'd protect her. That my job was to be there for her. This doesn't look like that."

  He called Katey from the guard gate – Homer let him use a landline wired to the booth. Louis' cell phone remains back at the truck. Lost now, probably.

  "They say…" Katey's voice drifts away.

  "What?"

  "They say she hurt one of the security guards in there. Real bad. Slit his throat ear to ear."

  Louis feels drunk. Like his center of gravity is a tiny boat on a rapid river.

  "She killed him?"

  Katey shakes her head. "He's not dead. Not yet. Critical condition but somehow he's still alive. I guess you can survive having your throat slit if it isn't too deep. If it doesn't hit an artery." She sniffs. "But they say he's barely holding on."

  "Miriam didn't do it. Or if she did, she had good reason."

  The wind picks up, casting stinging cold rain underneath the umbrella. Louis doesn't even notice it.

  "They took her, Katey. Took her and the other girl."

  "We need to tell the cops. Soon they're going to look at the tapes. And want to talk to me. Might as well get ahead of it." She pats his chest.

  "No. They're in on it. Don't tell them anything."

  She pulls away. "Now you're sounding a bit paranoid."

  "One of them came at me. I was following after this black Mercedes, and a cop car came hurtling through the intersection and blocked me. Next thing I knew, he started shooting at me."

  And now I've got his gun.

  And it has only three bullets left in the cylinder.

  "Black Mercedes," she says. Blinking. Thinking. "Well – no. No, that can't be right."

  "What? What is it?"

  "It doesn't seem like it should even matter but… the headmaster, Edwin Caldecott, he drives a black Mercedes."

  "Is he here?"

  "No, he never showed up this morning–"

  Then Louis hears the sound of tires splashing through deep puddles.

  Katey says, "Speak of the Devil, and the Devil shall appear."

  Louis turns.

  Sure enough, the black Mercedes. Coming up the drive. Soon it will pass directly in front of them.

  That's the car.

  He's sure of it. Sure as he's been of anything. He feels that certainty crawling around in his marrow like a canal of hungry worms.

  "Katey, I'll have to talk to you later."

  She says something in response but it's swallowed by the storm.

  Louis reaches for the gun and steps out in front of the Mercedes.

  It's time to find Miriam.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Hide and Seek

  She doesn't know how long she's been out here.

  She doesn't know where to go.

  All she knows is the rain. And the lightning and the thunder. And the time passing. Time that might be minutes. Time that might be hours.

  The Caldecott estate is sprawling. The house. The greenhouse behind it. A large pond with a white gazebo nesting on an island at its center. Tennis courts. Pool. Barn. Four-car garage. Another smaller barn. A shed, smaller yet.

  The one place she wants to run – the driveway, the one that will presumably take her to the road – is around the front of the house. She tried to run that way but heard voices. She went the other way.

  You need to get back.

  Find Louis.

  Find Wren.

  Then kill these monsters.

  Now she's at the back of the property. She found a small springhouse of crumbling wood and crooked stone over a spring that has run dry.

  Here she waits. With the cellar spiders and centipedes. Behind a warped wooden door that rattles and bangs any time the wind kicks up.

  Around the property are woods. She could just run wildly through the trees in the rain and the muck. But where would it take her? She's not even sure she has it in her to run that far, that fast.

  And the last thing she wants to do is break her goddamn ankle in a muddy hole. Drown face-down in a puddle fifty yards from the Caldecott estate.

  That leaves the driveway.

  There's probably a gate.

  And a camera.

  It's time, then, to look for a weapon.

  All she has here is the circle of flat stones surrounding the dry spring source (now just a moist dirt pucker like a cancerous asshole). She tries to pick one up, but they're mortared together. The shed, then, she thinks. The shed will have something. A shovel, rake, hedge trimmers, pool skimmer, wasp spray.

  She's about to open the door and peer out–

  But then, a sound.

  At first she thinks it's just the rain. Leave a fan on in a room or listen long and close to a hard rainfall and you'll hear things: murmurs and footsteps and voices calling your name.

  Then it comes again.

  "Miriam!"

  Someone calling her name.

  Except–

  Not just someone.

  Louis.

  It can't be. It's not possible.

  But again: "Miriam. Miriam. Where are you?"

  The voice is close. Not a shout, not a holler.

  My protector, she thinks. She fiddles with the iron latch on the door and a warm, strange tide of comfort washes over her. She's warm despite stepping out into the cold rain once more. With Louis on her side, she knows she's guarded, protected, shielded from evil.

  She steps out onto the loose stone pavers, clambers up over one of the small grassy berms bordering the springhouse. Her feet barely find purchase over the wet grass and smeary earth.

  Miriam hisses his name. "Louis! Louis, over here."

  She pulls herself over the top on her hands and knees.

  And there he stands.

  Not Louis.

  The cop.

  The one from the Keener's junkyard. With the handlebar mustache. Short and stout – not like a little teapot but rather like a thick-shouldered pit bull.

  Miriam is on her hands and knees before him. You fell for it again. The Mockingbird.

  The cop's got a gun in his black-gloved hands. A small pistol – a .380 maybe. Walther PPK. Water beading on the oiled metal.

  "Please," she says. But she already knows he's foe, not friend.

  He laughs. Coughs. Rain cascades over the brim of his cop hat.

  Then he says, "Miriam, Miriam, it's me, it's me."

  And he says it in Louis's voice.

  Of course.

  "You're the Mockingbird," she says. All the energy and hope is sucked out of her as the wind casts needles of rain against her cheek. The grass is slippery between her fingers.

  "We're all the Mockingbird. Whole family of 'em." He chuckles. "Your man should've killed me when he had the chance."

  He slams the gun into the side of her head. A head already wracked by the pain and daze of a concussion.

  Miriam rolls over.

  Fetal position.

  Everything hurts.

  His fat little hand gets a grip on her hair. A good grip. He twists his wrist so that he winds the hair around his hand, closing his fingers.

  He begins to drag her past the springhouse. Caveman-style. Through the rain and the mud. Not toward the house.

  Toward the pond.