The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  The other woman says, “You have a dirty mouth. I want to taste it.”

  Then it’s her mouth on Miriam’s–

  It’s five years later and it’s night in Key West and the air feels like the breath from a panting dog and she tosses and turns but her skin crawls and her heart is a jumpy mouse. It’s another panic attack where she feels oh so small in a world so big, like she’s nothing at all, just a bug under a boot, like all eyes are watching, like all eyes are judging–

  And she gets up and goes to the bathroom and turns on the light and the scars that criss-cross her face like the clumsy lacing of a crooked boot are puffy and pink and long-healed but still horrible, X’s and dashes of ruined skin. Across the nose. The brow. The cheeks. Lines cut into her cheeks. Her face is monstrous. Like when a child breaks a vase, then sloppily glues it back together again.

  The panic seizes her. She’s ugly. Mauled. Nobody will love her. Nobody could love her. Her breathing goes shallow. She feels woozy. Sick with self-hatred, like it’s an infection whose tendrils grow long and dig deep.

  This is it. She can’t do this. Can’t handle it. The horror and dread and disgust are a meteoric fist punching her into the dirt–

  She flings open the medicine cabinet.

  Oxycodone. Old prescription.

  She grabs that.

  And Ambien. Her sleeping pills.

  That, too.

  And Ativan. For the anxiety.

  She puts a bunch into her mouth. Not even sure how much. Not too many. She’s sure of that. The wrong amount is the right amount.

  She scoops water into her mouth from the faucet.

  The pills go down, and she goes back to bed.

  Soon she stops crying. And shaking. And sweating.

  And breathing.

  FIFTY-ONE

  STILL ALIVE

  Gabby is still alive.

  The vision says she dies in five years.

  Which means today, she’s still alive.

  But I bet I know who’s gonna carve up her face like that.

  Miriam slams her foot down on the pedal. She knows that it means a cop could stop her. Let them. Anybody tries to stop her, she’ll cut a path through them all.

  FIFTY-TWO

  PRETTY PRETTY CICATRIX

  The door is ajar.

  Blood on the inside doorknob. A handprint.

  Miriam hurries inside.

  She goes room to room – a small house, not a long journey – open kitchen, living room, bedroom. She smells a mix of perfume, piss, blood, and it’s in the bathroom that she finds Gabby.

  No no oh no I’m so sorry–

  Gabby, curled up in the well of the old clawfoot bathtub there. Lying in her own sticky blood. Her face vented, sliced, each cut like a fish’s gill, and as she sits up and cradles her head against Miriam’s thigh, the dry blood crackles and some of her cuts open anew–

  Fresh red soaks Miriam’s jeans.

  Miriam fumbles with her cell phone. She calls 911.

  She strokes Gabby’s hair. Kisses the back of her head. Tries to soothe her with shushes and coos but then worries that it sounds like she’s trying to quiet Gabby’s whimpers and cries and so instead she just tells her how sorry she is, how this is all her fault, how she’s going to get the guy who did this.

  Gabby speaks, then – with stiff lips where the words slip out broken and half-uttered but clear enough to hear. “Not all about you.”

  If only you knew.

  Gabby looks at Miriam. “He got you too.”

  Miriam nods. And I’m going to kill him for it. Somehow.

  “Don’t have…” A pause. “Health. Insurance.” And that brings on a new wave of tears. Out of all of this, that’s what makes Gabby cry the hardest: that she doesn’t have health insurance. Miriam thinks, Welcome to America, and finds that all the more heartbreaking.

  THE ARROW THROUGH THE HEART OF THE APPLE

  They take Gabby into the ambulance. Gabby cries, wants Miriam to come with her – but here, too, are the cops, and they want to talk to Miriam about what happened. And she thinks, I don’t have time for this, because two days left is rapidly about to become one day left as time bleeds out as if from a throat-slit pig. So she does the only sensible thing.

  She runs from the cops.

  There’s only three of them. And they’re inside, looking over the place, and she tells them she needs to go to her car to get her driver’s license – a lie, because she has no driver’s license – but she does go to the car.

  Then she gets in. And starts it.

  And drives away.

  Again, she finds herself with the windows down, the Florida air now trying to steal her breath instead of filling her with its own. Again she finds herself stripped down, scraped raw, haunted by trepidation and indecision. The highway ahead is a straight line and the future wants to be, too. Fate knocks over the dominoes and it all falls in the expected direction: her mother dies, Jerry dies, that asshole Peter dies, maybe Louis, maybe Wren, whoever else Ashley has on his list. All of them, murdered.

  All because she doesn’t know what to do next.

  Everything feels like it’s falling through her fingers. She thought she’d hunt Ashley but he beat her down, owned her ass like a man owns a kicked dog. And now, this. Gabby. What about Mother? He could already have her by now. Could already be torturing her somewhere. With his power, it’d be easy. He knows her moves. He knows what comes next even though she has no idea at all.

  Fuck!

  Sugar told her that there was something else – something she wasn’t looking for. Something under the water: a box. She thinks, Maybe it’s a secret weapon. Maybe it’s something I need to kill Ashley. But, then again, maybe it’s a big box of nothing. Seashells. Or money. Or just a pile of sand. And then what? What could she possibly find there that would save her own mother from extinction at the hands of a vengeful ex-lover – an ex-lover with the psychic power to see everybody’s next move before they even make one?

  No. That’s not an option. She can’t waste time looking for something that maybe won’t help her kill Ashley.

  That means she has to do what she didn’t want to do – go to the source of the next kill.

  Go home. See Mother. She’s gotta try. She can stand her ground there. Leaving home was a mistake all along.

  When Ashley shows his smiling face, Miriam will be waiting.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  CURTAINS

  Miriam doesn’t think anything of the gray car parked just down the block. All she can think about is Mother. In that little house. Unprotected.

  She pulls up across the street from Evelyn Black’s cottage and gets out of the car. Right now everything about Miriam feels like a fishing line pulled taut – she feels every little vibration, every jagged little worry, every small bite of pain magnified. Beaten up, but not beaten down. It occurs to her that inside her lurks an urge to kill, fierce as a house-fire and twice as hot. Like that’s a thing now: a thing she not only does but a thing she is. She doesn’t like it. But, the thought strikes her, I need it just the same.

  Strange now that she cares. About that woman. About her mother. For years she’s been wearing that emotional metaphysical colostomy bag around her hip – full of the thousands of angry, shitty thoughts wasted on that woman – and now she’s marching toward the house to save her.

  Life can be pretty fucking twisted, she decides.

  Ahead, the curtains at the kitchen window part. She sees her mother’s face there at the window. Maybe she’s imagining it, but she likes to believe the woman’s face brightens a little when she sees Miriam. Maybe brightens isn’t the word – maybe it’s just a shadow that lightens, but it’s enough.

  But then, another face just behind her.

  Ashley.

  Grinning, almost skeletal rictus. Bright eyes. Like he’s laughing.

  His hand wrenches back her mother’s head. The curtains flutter and fall closed. Miriam screams, breaks into a run–

  An
d that’s when she hears the scuff of a boot behind her.

  Her mother’s eyes go wide. She starts to shout from behind the glass.

  Miriam thinks, I’ve fallen into another trap.

  She spins around–

  INTERLUDE

  NOW

  Grosky grins. “And that’s when you met us.”

  Miriam clucks her tongue and nods.

  “The first time, at least,” she says. “You screwed it all up for me.”

  And I’m gonna screw it up for you.

  Vills paces, nervous.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  LOST TIME

  She’s like a cougar in a cat carrier – snarling and screaming behind a duct tape gag and shouldering the car door and trying to kick at the windows. The heavy-set guy driving has a gold watch biting into the meat of his wrist. The woman next to him is tall and lean, her hair wrestled into a wasp’s nest by all the humidity.

  They showed up just outside her mother’s. The woman had a gun. The man had a badge. Said they were FBI, they needed to speak to her.

  Miriam ducked, tries to run–

  But her body hurt. Sore all over. Her leg, still throbbing from where the saw cut her. Where her own knife stuck in her leg. And the rest of her – a body bag worked over by a young, eager boxer.

  That means she was slow.

  She screamed for her mother.

  But the big fuck and the skinny scribble of ink grabbed Miriam and wrestled her into the car. She kicked and hissed, but one of them clipped her on the back of the head with a gun. The strength went out of her, and then the reality slammed into her like a truck: They could shoot me, and then how will I save my mother? (Though there a grim thought entered her mind: If I let them shoot me, will that be the thing that ends Ashley’s fucked-up quest for vengeance? Could my death end all the other deaths?)

  No! No. She can’t think that way. If she dies, that just means Ashley gets to go on living. That can’t happen. That is not fucking allowed.

  Her only thought is:

  Maybe I can use them. Somehow. Some way.

  Now here she sits. In the back of a car driven by people she’s pretty sure aren’t Feds at all. They haven’t read Miriam her rights. They haven’t told her anything about lawyers. She’s got white plastic zip-ties binding her wrists at her back. She growls and struggles.

  Tap-Tap’s people? Maybe. They don’t look right for Tap-Tap. But a drug dealer like him probably has all kinds of motherfuckers in his pocket. And she owes Tap-Tap. She owes him what she’ll never pay. Wouldn’t be a surprise to have him snatch her off the street to take what he tried to take the first time: one of her limbs.

  If only she saw how one of these two will die.

  So many clues in death. So often that death reflects life in some way. Addicts overdose. Fat fucks like this one in the front seat overeat. The violent die violently. Even good people so often die in service to their virtues: Martin Luther King Jr catches a bullet. Woman trying to rescue a kitten from a tree has the branch break beneath her.

  How you die is who you are.

  Unfortunately, when these two shoved her in the car, neither of them touched her in a way that afforded her that precious skin-on-skin connection – hands on shirt, on sleeve, on hip, no touch of the neck or arm or hand. She was sure when they zip-tied her hands that she would see something – but oh no, those things are like designed for cuff-use now: two holes for the hands and a ripcord to pull to tighten it.

  And now here she is.

  An hour later.

  In a car heading… she has no idea where. But she sees signs – Palm Beach, Port St Lucie – that tell her they’re heading north.

  She screams behind the gag.

  It’s killing her. Because every hour in the car is another hour it will take to get back. Time taking two steps forward instead of one.

  She replays it again and again: Her mother’s face at the window. Ashley behind her. The curtains closing.

  Her mother, on a boat.

  So many plunges of the knife.

  Water and blood and the underside of a boat.

  As she watches from a porthole only six feet away.

  The heavyset driver nods to the woman, who reaches back and rips the tape off Miriam’s mouth. The very moment it’s off, Miriam explodes:

  “Fuck you! You fucking animals! Who are you? Do you know what you’ve done?” She howls at them. A primal velociraptor shriek.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Calm down,” the big fuck says. “We’re just going somewhere to sit a while, maybe have a chat.”

  “Just a chat,” the woman says.

  Miriam thinks, I need to get out of this car.

  A car going 75mph on I-95?

  Miriam then thinks, I need to stop this fucking car.

  But how?

  For now: delay.

  Use them. Abuse them.

  “We can chat now,” she says.

  “I’d rather get more comfortable somewhere,” the big guy says.

  “It’ll just be a few hours,” the woman says. “Sit tight. You want some music on?” She reaches for the dial but Miriam barks at her like a dog.

  “No music. How’d you find me anyway?”

  “You gave your name at that crime scene down in Key West five hours ago. Then we caught you on some traffic cams. Checked the car, saw it was registered to Evelyn Black – so we showed up and waited.”

  “What do you want from me? You’re not Feds. No way you’re the Feds.”

  Big guy laughs. “We’re FBI, I promise.”

  “I’ve been told that before.” Find out more about them. Take something from them. These people, she decides, are tools. Tools handed to her for an unknown reason. Fate is trying to fuck her over, and that means it’s time to fuck right back. Hell, she’s seen the future. She knows what fate wants. Fate wants her on that boat. She just has to figure out how to earn that particular outcome. Concentrate on the boat. So she says, “Prove it to me.”

  “Prove what?” the woman says.

  “That you’re the real-deal Feds.”

  “You saw our IDs,” the big fuck says with a laugh.

  “I stole a boat,” Miriam lies. “A good-size fishing boat. I stole it from somewhere down in the Keys. Tell me where I stole it from.”

  The woman turns around and puts a crooked Ichabod Crane finger to her thin earthworm lips. “Honey. Shhh. We’d hate to have to gag you–”

  “Nah, nah, nah,” the big guy says, waving one hand off the steering wheel. “Let’s humor her. Maybe she’ll play nice if we pony up. Am I right, Miss Black? If I give you what you want, you’ll give us what we want?”

  “You betcha,” she says, putting on her best golly gee sure officer always happy to help an officer of the peace voice.

  The big guy pulls out a crusty old flip phone, pops the clamshell and hits one button. He has a one-sided conversation: “Yeah, hey, Tony. Grosky. Right. No, I don’t… Hold up, listen. White fishing boat. Stolen from somewhere in the Keys. Got any data for me? Yeah, I’ll hold.” He gives Miriam a patronizing little smile-and-nod. His neck fat jiggles. “What’s that? Uh-huh. Mariposa Marina. Ramrod Key.” Now he looks back and gives her a cocky, See, I told you I could do it look.

  But she interjects: “Name of the boat.”

  Him, holding his hand over the phone. “What?”

  “I said, what’s the name of the boat I stole?”

  Back to the phone. “Tony. What’s the name of that boat?” He holds up a placating finger. “Ah. The Swallow? The Swallow.”

  The Swallow.

  Of course.

  Ashley knows about the Mockingbird Killer. About the Caldecotts. A family of killers who shared the common characteristic of a naval swallow tattoo. Who shared the duties of murders done in service to their mother’s twisted visions.

  He’s mocking her.

  She should have figured that out. It’s no surprise he chose a boat not just because of its functionality but beca
use of its message for her. And suddenly she feels slow and stupid and behind the eight ball, because no matter where she goes, he’s out there messing with her.

  One step ahead.

  It makes her angry.

  Angry at herself. Angry at him. Angry at everyone in this car.

  The big guy turns back around, the ruddy mounds of sweat-shined cheeks pulled back to show the wide white veneers of his smile and he’s about to gloat and say something–

  Miriam wrenches her body upward at the hips–

  And kicks him with both feet in the face.

  His head rocks back and he’s already turning and pawing at the steering wheel like a housecat trying to claw through a closed door – and already the car is losing control and careening left, then right. Then his heavy foot is punching down on the brakes and she hears the tires skid beneath them and the tires of other cars skidding–

  She awaits the sound of shearing metal.

  She awaits the car being split in half like a soda can hit with a shotgun.

  She awaits death and all its accouterments: blood, fire, piss, shit, screams, this time all her own–

  But the thought strikes her fast as a lightning whip. I don’t die here.

  Fate wants her on that boat.

  Ashley wants to give her a show.

  The thought strikes her again, this time giddy, mad, a flurry of lunatic bubbles rising up from her heart and into her brain. I don’t die here!

  As the car slides to a complete stop, Miriam cries out and pushes past the pain to kick at the back passenger side window–

  The big fuck in the driver’s seat is looking around, woozy, trying to get a measure of what’s happening. He tries turning the key again but the car’s engine bitches and moans but doesn’t turn over.

  Cars zoom past outside. Honking.