by Chuck Wendig
"Sure," he says.
And then they stand, sharing silence and the whisper of rain.
"Listen," he finally says. "I think I maybe messed things up back in the truck. I think maybe I gave off the wrong impression, like I was some kind of weirdo. And heck, maybe I am. It's just – I don't meet a lot of nice people. I didn't mean to get strange or act out, and I didn't mean to put you on the spot about going out sometime."
Miriam tries not to laugh, but she laughs. He looks hurt, and she waves him off. "I'm not laughing at you, dude, I'm laughing at me. At the situation. Irony is alive and well. You're the farthest thing from weird. You're a thousand million miles from weird. Trust me. I'm the odd duck. Not you. You're just a guy. A very nice guy. I'm the crazy bitch who had a spaz attack."
"No, I get it – long night, long highway, stressful situations, it's all good." Louis pulls a crumpled receipt from his jeans pocket and fishes out a pen. He presses the receipt up against the Waffle House window and writes something, then gives it to her. "That's my number. My cell; I don't have a landline anymore. I can't pick up another load for a few days – the economy basically fell off the horse and it hurts the little guys like me – but that means I'm still around."
"You're still around," she says. Knife in eye. Slurping sound. Miriam? "Well. I dunno."
"Who's this?" Ashley asks, coming out of the Waffle House, rangy arms crossed, a defensive posture. "Friend of yours?"
"No," she says. "Yes. I dunno. He gave me a ride."
Louis towers over Ashley. He's a pillar, a monolith. Ashley is just a wind-blown blade of grass in his shadow. Doesn't stop him from sticking his chin out and puffing up his chest. The two men stare bullets at each other.
"This your old boyfriend?" Louis asks.
"What? The black-eye boyfriend?" Miriam can't help but laugh. "No. Gods, no."
"Good meeting you, big guy," Ashley says. "We gotta split. See you later."
"Okay," Louis says. "I get it. I'm going to go inside, get a waffle."
Ashley smiles. "Smart way to play it, buddy."
Louis just grunts, and it's like the air has been sucked out of him. He's a big guy, like Ashley said, but suddenly he looks very small. Louis tosses Miriam a sad look over his shoulder, then heads inside. Ashley makes a jerk-off motion with his hand. "Toodle-oo, fucker," he says, laughing.
SIXTEEN
Gravity
Still night. Still pissing rain.
Ashley presses her up against the brick wall. He parked the car. He said he wanted to show her something. They got out, and now here they are. The city's noises play around them – mild for a city, but still loud: the honking, the yelling, the laughing, the music drifting from somewhere far away.
Miriam feels the brick against her back. Ashley's up against her.
"Fuck off of me," she says, pushing him back. But he moves right back into place, like one of those clowns you punch down just so he can stand back up, grinning.
"You knew him," he whispers, chuckling. "The trucker."
"He gave me a ride. He's just a guy."
She smells his breath. Mint. She's surprised to see him lolling a Lifesaver around on his tongue. Miriam hopes her breath smells like an ashtray.
Ashley's nose touches her own; then his cheek is against her cheek. His skin is smooth. No stubble. Feminine, almost. Hot breath reaches her ear.
"Just a guy? I don't buy it. You like him."
"I don't like him."
"No, you don't like me. But you do like him."
He bites her earlobe. Not hard enough to draw blood. But hard enough.
She pushes him away. He laughs. His hands hold her hips.
"I don't give a shit about that guy. I don't give a shit about anybody."
Ashley searches her face. She feels his eyes on her. The way his gaze roams, it's like a pair of hands. She gets a rush. Her heart flutters like a bird with a broken wing.
"Something else is going on here," he says. His thumb undoes the top button of her jeans. His fingers play idly around the waistband. His eyes widen. Revelation. "He's your mark."
"Fuck you. Get your hands out of my pants."
She says it and doesn't mean it.
He asks her the big question.
"When does he die?"
His hand slides down deeper. His fingers tease at her. She's getting wet like a hot summer day, sodden like a swamp, and she hates it.
"Go to hell."
His fingers move up inside her. She gasps.
"Let me help you."
"I don't need your help." She wants to moan. She stifles it.
"He's a trucker. Truckers have lots of money. I'll help you get it."
"I said, I don't need–" He does this thing with thumb and forefinger. She shuts up. She feels weak. Controlled. Like she's a robot and he's got the remote control.
"You definitely need something."
His fingers thrust harder.
He laughs.
Motel room. Floral print bedspread. Gold-rimmed mirror with the old showbiz-style lights marking its perimeter. A painting of a magnolia tree on the wall. The room is clean, but smells of mold ill-concealed by disinfectant.
Miriam sits at the edge of the bed, smoking. She eyes the metal suitcase, wondering what's in it.
Naked, she massages the carpet with her toes. Another motel. Another fuck. Another cigarette. Circles and circles, the spinning snake, the endless carousel. She wants a drink to drown in.
Ashley comes out of the bedroom, brushing his teeth with one hand, hiking on a pair of boxers with the other.
"Rapist," she says.
"Can't rape the willing," he snaps back with a wink.
"I know. Besides, I could've broken your jaw. I just want you to feel icky, is all."
Around the toothbrush, he gleefully mumbles, "I don't."
"I know that, too."
Back in the bathroom, he swishes, spits, and swishes again.
"No means no," she calls after him.
"Not usually," he calls back, before exiting the bathroom. He wipes toothpaste froth from his chin with the back of his hand. "So let's hear the deets."
"The deets."
"Of the trucker's death."
"Louis. His name is Louis."
"Uh-huh. Whatever. His first name is Mark. His last name is Victim. He's got money, I know that much. Truckers always have money. They get big paydays but don't have the time or the place to spend it – unless they're married. He married?"
"Wife left him, he says."
She feels queasy. Traitorous. A dirty quisling.
"Then he's got money. Probably doesn't keep it in a bank, either, because one day you're in Toledo, the next you're in Portland, the third day you're in Assfuck, New Mexico – if you can't find a bank, and you want money, you gotta pay all those fees. Plus, half these trucker assholes are cranked up on amphetamines they buy at rest stops. Dealers and pimps don't take debit cards. Trust me."
"He's not a dope fiend."
Ashley shrugs. "Yeah, you know him so well. So, back to the original question: How does he bite it? Car wreck? That'll suck, because he probably keeps the cash in his truck. Won't help us if it all burns up."
"He dies in a lighthouse. In–" She does some quick math. "Two weeks. Fourteen days."
"How?"
"I'm not telling."
"That's awfully fourth grade of you."
"It's private. It's his death."
"You get to know it."
She takes a drag off her smoke. "And I wish I didn't."
"Fine. Whatever. A lighthouse is at least a scenic way to go, so how nice for him. We're in North Carolina, and up the coast are what I imagine to be a shit-ton of lighthouses." He starts pacing. "Okay, here's the plan. Get close to him. Call him tomorrow. Go out with him. We got two weeks, so we need to know where he's going to be when he sucks the pipe."
"That's your genius plan? That's why I need you?"
He shrugs. "I didn't hear you come up with it."
"And tell me, why don't we just take his money while he's still alive?"
"Because people who are alive don't like you taking their stuff. People who are dead make fewer calls to 911."
She watches him carefully. "And none of this bothers you? You're not jealous?"
"I don't mind being green with envy if I'm also green with a wad of hundred-dollar bills," he says. "Now let's hit the sack. I'm beat."
SEVENTEEN
Blood and Balloons
Miriam jolts awake. A shadow passes over her eyes.
She sits up. Her eyes adjust to the darkness. Ashley lies next to her, unmoving.
Her eyes catch sight of the shadow again – it eases into the corner, then ducks into the bathroom, a whispery, crinkly sound accompanying the drifting shape.
She reaches down over the edge of the bed, her hand darting into her messenger bag and coming up with the butterfly knife, a knife she bought at a flea market in Delaware for six bucks. Soundlessly, she flips open the blade.
Her feet touch carpet. Gentle steps stalking the shape.
Her free hand slides along the wall around the doorframe of the bathroom. Fingers find the light switch.
Click. Harsh, garish light.
Her heart stops.
A red Mylar balloon floats in the upper corner of the bathroom. It bobs and shifts. On the balloon is a picture of a cake, and above the cake, written in the cartoony flames of the cake's candles, is a message: Happy Birthday, Miriam.
"It's not my birthday," she says, apparently talking to the balloon.
The balloon shifts – another whispery crinkle – and drifts to the center of the room. Miriam looks at herself in the mirror. Both eyes are bruised. A rime of crusted blood rings her nostrils.
"This is a dream," she says.
The balloon turns slowly – on the back is another message.
A skull and crossbones are where the cake should be. From the skull's open mouth, emerging through crooked, jaunty teeth, a comic strip word bubble: Happy DEATH-day, Miriam.
"Cute," she says, and she thrusts up with the knife.
The balloon pops.
And it sprays blood everywhere. Black blood. Thick with clots. Miriam wipes it off her face, spitting. It runs down the mirror, globs of rusty treacle. Bits of pale tissue are trapped in the flow like maggots in tree sap. She's seen this before, seen this kind of blood. (On the floor, on the bathroom floor.)
She doesn't know why, but she runs her hand across the mirror, wiping a clear spot away so she can see her reflection.
What she sees surprises her.
It's still her, the reflection. But she's young. Chestnut hair pulled back and tied with a pink scrunchie. No makeup. Eyes wider, fresher, that glimmer of innocence.
Then, movement behind her, in the reflection, obscured by coagulating clumps of gore.
"Nine more pages," says a voice. Louis's voice.
Miriam wheels, but it's too late. He's got a red snow shovel.
He cracks her across the head, laughing. All goes dark. As she's drawn deep into the well of unconsciousness, she hears the squalling cries of a child, and then that fades, too.
She wakes to the antiseptic stink of a hospital. It crawls up her nose. It nests there.
Her hands clutch the sheets. She struggles to get out of bed, to swing her feet over the edges, but the sheets have tangled her, and the bed is edged with a metal rail that she cannot, not for the life of her, seem to overcome. It's as if they form an invisible perimeter. It's hard for her to get air. Her lungs won't draw full breaths. She feels trapped, like in a box, in a coffin. Sucking breath, tight throat, gasp.
Hands reach out suddenly – hard hands, heavy hands – and they grab her ankles and, no matter how hard she struggles, buckle her feet into cold rubber stirrups. The palms feel greasy, wet. A face emerges from the edge of the bed, rising up from between her legs.
It's Louis. He tugs aside a mint-green surgical mask with blood-stained fingers.
"There's been a lot of blood," he says.
Miriam struggles. The sheets have coiled around her hands. "This is a dream."
"Could be." Louis reaches up and scratches the edges of the electrical tape X over his right eye. "Sorry. The tape itches."
"Get my legs out of those stirrups."
"If it's just a dream," he says, "why not just wake up?"
She tries. She really tries. She cries out, willing herself to wake.
Nothing. The world remains. Louis cocks his head. "Still think it's a dream?"
"Fuck you."
"Such a dirty mouth. It's why you'll be an unfit mother."
"Fuck your mother."
"You're like that girl in that movie, the one where she gets possessed by the devil? You know the one. All that vomit. All that angry rage slagging our blessed Lord and Savior."
Miriam pulls again at the stirrups. Sweat beads on her brow. She grunts in frustration, anger, fear. Why can't I wake up? Wake up, you stupid girl, wake up.
"We're going to have to stitch you up," Louis says. He leers toward the exposed space between her legs and licks his lips. "Tie it shut, nice and tight."
"You're not Louis. You're just a phantom in my head. You're my own brain, toying with me."
"It's Doctor Louis, I'll have you know. Respect the credentials." He pulls out a needle. It's huge, like a crotchet needle. Like a baby's finger. He sticks out his tongue to concentrate and, even blind, is able to thread a dirty, fraying cord through the eye of the fat needle. "You don't even know my last name, do you?"
"You don't have a last name," she huffs, trying to free her hands. "You're a figment. A fragment. I don't care about you. I don't care about ghosts and goblins."
"You feel guilty. That's okay. I'd feel guilty, too. We can talk about that, but before we do, I really need to stitch up your naughty place. That's medical lingo, by the way: naughty place. But I know you're fond of certain words, so, let me rephrase that: I need to sew shut this stinking, worm-choked cunt of yours so that you can never have another baby, because the last thing the world needs is for you to breed true once more and crack your whore's pelvis giving birth to whatever little godless maggot decides to wriggle free from your scabbed womb."
Miriam is horrified – horrified at the words coming out of his (her?) mouth. She wants to say something, but her voice is just a squeak, a hoarse squeal. She tries to say no, tries to reach out and stop him –
But his head dips down and the fat needle pierces her labia, and she feels a gush of blood and she tries to scream but no scream will come –
Long highway – tapering to nothing in one direction, and tapering to nothing in another. Gray, blasted, pale, cracked. Desert on both sides: red earth, pale scrub. Blue sky above, but far off a rolling thunderhead like an anvil tumbles end over end over end.
Miriam stands on the shoulder of the highway. She catches her breath, as if she just emerged from the icy waters of a winter lake.
She feels her thighs, her crotch. No pain. No blood.
"Jesus," she gasps.
"Not quite," a voice from behind her.
Louis, again, with those dead-X eyes.
He smiles.
"Don't come near me," she warns. "You come near me, I will break your tree-trunk neck, I swear to all that is holy."
He chuckles, shaking his head. "C'mon, Miriam. You've already established that this is a dream. You already know that I'm you. So are you saying you want to break your own neck? That's very counter-productive. Suicidal, really. You should seek professional help."
Louis starts to pace, and as he moves, Miriam sees two crows in the middle of the highway. Dark beaks peck at a smashed armadillo, pulling up strings and tendons of red. The dead animal almost looks like a cracked Easter egg. The birds peck at each other.
"Maybe I'm not you," Louis says, slowly ping-ponging from dusty shoulder to dusty shoulder. "Maybe I'm God. Maybe I'm the Devil. Could be that I'm the living manifestation of fate, of destiny, of that thin
g you curse every morning you wake and every night before you lay your head to sleep. Who can say? All I know is, it's time to meet ze monsta."
Miriam begins to pace along with him. They are like two predatory cats, stalking each other on two sides of the same cage.
