Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

  Louis is on her, holding her down.

  "Whoa," he says, "Hold on, bucking bronco, hold on. You're okay. You're okay."

  A white cotton pad sits over his left eye, held there by a yellow elastic band.

  "Fuck you," she hisses. "You go to hell. Answer my question. Who are you? What do you mean, we? Get out of my head. I want to die or wake up. I want to die or wake up!"

  "You are awake," he says, and strokes her hair. "Shhh."

  She blinks.

  This Louis smells of soap.

  And he has one working eye.

  And her chest hurts like someone just stabbed her there. Which, last time she checked, is exactly what happened.

  "I'm not asleep?" she asks in a small voice.

  "Nope."

  "This isn't a dream?"

  "I don't think so, though I can say it still sometimes feels like one."

  Miriam doesn't know what to say. She blurts, "I'm sorry."

  "Sorry?"

  "This situation is… complex. And it's my fault."

  He sits down in the chair next to the bed. "It's complex, all right. Not too sure it's your fault, though."

  "You can't really understand, and you wouldn't believe me if I told you–"

  "I read your diary," he says.

  She stares.

  "What?"

  He pulls it out from the back of his waistband and rests it on her lap. "I'm sorry. I know that's not a real nice thing to do, but you left me needing some answers. I hope you understand that. I thought you were just trying to rip me off – and maybe, once upon a time, you were – but next thing I know, I'm in a lighthouse and some bald weirdo is trying to cut out my eyes, and then you're there, and you're half-dead at the bottom of the lighthouse and the bald weirdo is all dead in the middle, and… I needed to know what was going on. You were gone from this world, so I couldn't ask you anything. All I had was this book – it had fallen out when you took your tumble."

  Miriam draws a deep breath, and it hurts like hell. "So you know. You know what I am. What I see."

  "I do."

  "Do you believe it?"

  "I reckon I do. Either that, or you just performed the longest, weirdest con in the history of con-jobs."

  "Do I see a hint of a smile?"

  "You might. Even after all this, you might."

  She hesitates, but she's never been known before for traipsing around touchy subjects.

  "Did they save the eye?"

  Louis bites at his thumbnail. "Nope."

  "I'm so sorry."

  He waves it off. "Things happen in this life. Sometimes they're good things, and sometimes they're bad things. You have to come to terms with the bad things, especially when you can't change them."

  "And when you can change them?"

  "Then you do your damnedest to make those changes."

  An image of Ingersoll, blood bubbling up out of the bullet hole, flies before her eyes.

  "I guess you do," she says.

  "Heck," he says, leaning back. "At least I got this cool eye-patch."

  "That you do. If they don't let you drive a truck anymore, maybe you could be a pirate."

  "It's the pirate's life for me."

  She laughs.

  "You going to stick around?" she asks. "I know you probably have places to be, but I'm guessing that they're going to keep me here a little while longer."

  "They are. At least another week. You fractured some bones, and there was this funny thing about a knife sticking out of your lung."

  "It's just, I think I need somebody right now."

  He nods. "I do, too."

  "So you're not going anywhere?"

  "Only wherever you're going. You saved my life – kind of. For that, I figure I owe you my time."

  She smiles. "Can you do me one more favor?"

  "Name it."

  It hurts to do so, but she picks up the diary and pitches it at him like a Frisbee. He almost doesn't catch it, but he fumbles it a few times before getting a grip.

  "Still working on that depth perception thing," he says.

  "Oh. Sorry."

  "What's the favor?"

  "Throw that away," she says.

  "How about I just throw it in the ocean?"

  She frowns and makes an "uck" noise. "I wouldn't do that to the poor fishies. Plus, I always hate that scene in the movies. Throw it in the ocean, it's always out there. Or it'll wash up on the shore for someone to find. Get rid of it. All the pages are used up. It tells a story I don't want to tell. Find a trashcan and throw it out. Better still, a dumpster, and better than that, a giant belching furnace, the kind that burns up bodies."

  He stands and kisses her. His lips are dry, but that doesn't stop them from being soft, or it from being the best damn kiss she's ever dreamed could be kissed.

  "I'll throw it away," he says.

  "I hurt."

  "I know."

  "I think I need to sleep."

  "I know that, too. You going to be okay for a while? You look a little sad."

  Miriam shrugs as much as she can manage. "It is what it is, Louis. It is what it is."

  About the Author

  Chuck Wendig is a novelist, screenwriter, and game designer.

  He is the author of the novels Double Dead and Blackbirds.

  He is a fellow of the Sundance Screenwriting Lab. His short film (written with co-author and director Lance Weiler) Pandemic showed at the Sundance Film Festival in 2011. That same year, Collapsus – a digital transmedia drama, also co-authored with Weiler – was nominated for an International Digital Emmy and a Games 4 Change award.

  He has contributed over two million words to the game industry, and was developer of the popular Hunter: The Vigil game line.

  He currently lives in Pennsyltucky with his beautiful wife Michelle, their taco terrier Tai-Shen, and his son (known as "B-Dub").

  You can find him at his website, Terrible Minds, where he remains busy dispensing dubious writing wisdom. Said dubious wisdom is collected in eBook form, such as in the popular 500 Ways To Be A Better Writer.

  terribleminds.com

  Acknowledgments

  Authors all look like we lone wolf it, like we are ronin-ninja-without-clan, like it's just us out there traversing the icy creative sea in our little tugboats. The book has our name on it and nobody else's, and at the end of the day, that's a big face full of nonsense.

  No book comes to term without a whole ecosystem supporting the birth of that book. Like Soylent Green, a book is made of people, and I'd like to thank those people, now.

  Thanks first to Stephen Susco for helping me hammer this thing in shape.

  Thanks to Jason Blair and Matt Forbeck for suggesting Angry Robot as a potential home for Miriam Black.

  Thanks to my agent, Stacia Decker, for helping make that happen, and further, thanks to all the great folks – Lee, Marco, Darren – at Angry Robot who are the nicest cuddliest steel-and-circuitboard overlords an author guy like me could ever have.

  Thanks too to Joey HiFi for offering up one of the coolest covers I could've ever imagined. Have you looked at that cover? Seriously. Take another long. Stare at it. Go ahead. You can caress it. I won't tell anybody.

  Thanks to my many readers at terribleminds.

  And thanks to my wife, Michelle and my newborn, Ben. Both of which keep me sane when I need to be sane, and encourage me to be crazy when I need to be crazy. Love you guys.

  CHUCK WENDIG in conversation with Adam Christopher

  The end! Right? Well, for the moment anyway, but Miriam Black returns in MOCKINGBIRD in September 2012. So while we wait – and boy, what a wait! – let's get the author himself, Mr Chuck Wendig, in the interrogation chair, apply the electrodes, and turn the voltage up. It's okay. He says he enjoys it.

  Let's start at the top: where did Blackbirds come from?

  The same place all authors get their ideas: a small defunct post office in Topeka, Kansas. We receive a red envelope. We open it with a tincture
of tears and blood. And inside is the idea. A ghost waiting to be given bones and flesh.

  Okay, maybe not.

  Like with most stories, Blackbirds doesn't precisely have a single point of origin – lots of disparate elements came crashing together one night and, boom, an idea baby was born.

  First: two songs. "Another White Dash" and "Life Is Short" by Butterfly Boucher. Can't reprint the lyrics here but it's worth Googling – both deal with traveling and crashing on couches and being a bit of a drifter and, in the case of the latter song, how life is indeed an all-too-brief thing. (At least, that's how I read 'em.)

  Second: death. Over the period of a few years, several of my loved ones passed away. Both grandmothers, one from cancer, one from a seemingly endless series of strokes. Then my aunt died: cancer. Then my father died: cancer.

  Death has this very special way of making you feel helpless – you can't see the Grim Reaper arrive, but arrive he does and with a swoop of his unstoppable scythe the people you love and need are taken away lickety-split.

  Cancer diagnoses are double-trouble – you get a clear warning sign that death is coming. Soon as someone goes on hospice care, the great big pocketwatch is made visible and you see that you don't have many hours left before it winds down.

  And I thought, what a horrible thing. To know that. On the one hand, great, yes, you have time to say goodbye and make peace, but on the other hand, it offers uncomfortable foresight.

  Here the fiction writer's brain does all those cruel leaps and cackling pirouettes – it would be terrible in a way to possess that foresight in a very real, psychic sense. To see how others were going to die.

  So, I wrote this document called Poor-Miriam.doc and it was about this girl who could see how someone was going to die just by touching them. The trick was, Miriam could see the death, yes, but she did not have all the details and she could seemingly do nothing to stop it.

  Then I paired that with another totally-unrelated document I'd written that introduced the two killers of this piece: Frankie and Harriet. It was a meaningless exercise in writing character, just an attempt to put these two odd and ill-fitting assassins together and see what happened. Though, as it turns out, not too meaningless at all.

  Because from there, the story exploded in my head. Miriam and her psychic ability and these two killers and then all the characters and plotty bits in-between. What ended up was fairly different from how I started, but it's in this weird confluence of things that the story's origins lurk.

  Frankie and Harriet started life as character studies? How often do you do exercises like that? Is that something useful for a writer? How often have things that have been filed away like this proved useful for other projects?

  I take a lot of random notes. If I get a character or a story idea – or hell, even a story title – I'll write it down. Is it useful? Sure. I have a brain like a sieve, so I can't count on my own mind to remember something I thought about three years ago. Or three weeks ago. Or even three minutes ago. Who are you again? How did you get inside my book? CALL THE ROBOT POLICE.

  Within these pages, nobody can hear you scream, Mr. Wendig! Times like this I wish I had a moustache to twirl.

  Oooh. Sorry. See? Something wrong with my upstairs. Got moonbats in my moon belfry, I suspect. And twirling mustaches is overrated. The new thing is angrily grabbing fistfuls of beard and screaming. Get on board.

  Point is, this little mental dumping ground has proved useful more than once. Most of my short stories come out of this space where I stitch together random and once-unrelated elements.

  One of the great things about Blackbirds is the strength of the characters, even the minor ones. Miriam really strikes me as a complex, multifaceted personality. As a man, did writing a female lead present any particular challenges, or were there certain things you wanted to include, as well as things you wanted to avoid? Did you consciously plan Blackbirds to have a female lead, or was that what the story required?

  It was not a thing that I thought very hard about – from the beginning the protagonist was always a woman. It just seemed that's what the tale demanded. Not sure why. Eventually her being a woman figured into it in greater ways – having a miscarriage is not something a man will ever experience.

  (Actually, that miscarriage is another one of those story events that came screaming out of a real-life event. I was at a friend's college and one morning in the girls' bathroom, the floor was covered in dark clotting blood and, true or not, the rumor went around that a girl got really wasted and had a miscarriage right there in the bathroom. Grim business, but the fiction writer's mind is a sponge for such horror.)

  It's odd only when I think about it that these books showcase the stories of women, whether it's Miriam and her mother, Harriet and her husband, Mrs. Gaynes and her troubled son. But it wasn't odd when writing them: it just felt like that's the story I wanted to tell and these are the connections buried within.

  The other thing I love is that you're very careful to leave out as much as you put in to the story – we have glimpses of Miriam's childhood (shades of Stephen King's Carrie there!), Ingersoll's heritage, and other hints of the magical and perhaps supernatural. But, crucially, these thing only add to the mystery. What do you think the source of Miriam's power is? We've got psychics and bone readers – what else exists in the world?

  The source is trauma, I think. Sometimes bad things happen and those bad things unlock other bad things – like letting a monster out of its cage. Miriam almost died and had her baby die and that leaves a very potent psychic scar. You become an antenna that broadcasts pain, yes, but you also receive that terrible frequency from others.

  That aspect leaves room for other psychic abilities to exist in Miriam's world. I think her ability is singular (in that no one else can see what she can see), but I suspect that others with different abilities of the mind await. In fact, I'm just being coy. I know they do. You should get a gander at Mockingbird.

  As to whether or not this world contains vampires, ghouls, werewolves, zombies – no, I don't see that happening.

  That said, Miriam's visions and dreams provide an interesting question. What is it that's talking to her? Is it a ghost? The ghost of her unborn child? Is it some strange spirit of fate or free will, some entity from beyond the veil? Or is it her own active imagination, her psychic will given persona? I think I know the answer, but I'm not telling. Not yet.

  The biggest mystery is perhaps unveiled when Miriam visits the psychic – this is a pivotal moment for the character, and suddenly the story drops into some very weird territory indeed. Is Miriam's past and the nature of her power – and what may lie within her – something we'r going to follow in Mockingbird?

  Oh, yes. Mockingbird returns to Miriam a year later and sees that she's been keeping her power under wraps – she wears gloves, tries not to touch people, avoids her curse-slash-gift at any cost.

  But when she returns from self-imposed exile, it all comes back to her in a big and sudden way. Further, as the story develops, so too do her powers – she gets another couple curious tricks up her sleeve.

  We learn too, a little more about her past, in terms of her relationship with her family.

  Was Miriam's story always going to be a duology?

  Her story was always meant to be, if it needed to be, a standalone one-and-done story. You can come into her life and then be with her during this weird and awful time – a time of great change, upheaval, a major pivot point for her character – and then leave her be, confident that she has changed. For the better or for the worse, who knows?

  But to me, the book has always lived on inside my head as a series. Not just two books, but a whole line of tales. Miriam's psychic ability allows for a great procedural hook: she can effectively solve and/or avenge murders before they happen. Couple that with her character – for me, easy to write and damaged enough to see how she both puts herself back together and breaks herself in whole new ways – and it feels to me like she's got le
gs as a series character.

  That's my plan, at least. I know where her story ends. The tale of Miriam Black is far from over, not with Blackbirds, nor with Mockingbird.

  Blackbirds is pretty dark, although there is a lot of humour and wit. There's also a lot of swearing and a lot of violence, which reflect the life that Miriam has led and the situation she now finds herself in. Did this require a particular mindset to write? The action sequences are very well choreographed. How much planning does it take to write a really good fight scene?