by Chuck Wendig
When she’s finally done and left panting, Mary stands up.
“I’m going to make this threat one time, and I know I’ll have to make good on it because I can tell you’re not the type to listen to good sense. But they’ve hired me to help them, and one of the ways I’m going to help them is that I know all your pressure points. I don’t just mean physically. I mean, I know what hurts you. I know how to make you bleed and cry and die inside. I know how to break you down, whittle you like a stick. So, here’s the carrot: you tell them where Isaiah is, and I’ll give you what you want. I’ll tell you how to get shut of your curse, your power. How to pinch that artery off for good. You don’t do that, then it’s adult swim time, honey. All kids out of the pool.”
A surge of hope: Isaiah is not here.
And then, a secondary feeling: how tantalizing that offer sounds.
Grapes hanging above her head, plump and juicy. All she has to do is reach up and pluck them off their branch. And her mind goes through the mental calisthenics, the justifications: They don’t want to hurt Isaiah. They’ll consider him family. His mother is dead. Gabby and I can’t take him. Foster kids are routinely abused. Who cares? That old Polish phrase again: Not my circus, not my monkeys. She can taste it. Taste those sweet grapes.
“You a woman of your word?” Miriam asks.
“You bet I am.”
“You won’t hurt him? Or the people he’s with?”
“Not in the cards, as I understand it.”
Miriam shuts her eyes. Takes a deep breath.
And then she tells Mary the address.
Mary just nods. Then starts to walk away.
“Wait,” Miriam cries. “You were going to tell me. You made a deal.”
Mary Stitch shrugs. “One I’ll honor if they tell me to. But I’ve gotta tell Ethan first. Then he can sign off on if you really get a bite of this carrot or not.”
“Fuck you.”
Mary chuckles, then ducks under the tent flap and is gone.
FORTY-EIGHT
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Time slips like a bad transmission.
Nights pass by. Two? Maybe three. Days stretch out before her like a long highway. Sun up and over the tent. Creeping under the fabric— a hot line of magma at the right of the tent in the morning, on the left at night. Or is it the opposite? Miriam can’t tell. Can’t remember. Can’t anything.
Tries to move. Or pretend she can. One wrist handcuffed to a bedrail.
She feels hot and cold. Shivers. Coughs. Her heartbeat is fast as a cricket one minute, then slow as molasses the next. People move in and out of the tent. Shapes in fast-forward. Mostly men in camo pants, dark shirts. Like they’re military, though they’re not. There’s a doctor, too, a tall woman, Latina, hair cropped short— she says little as she checks bandages, takes temperature. Miriam tries to talk to her, but the woman, she says nothing. Here and gone again.
In the black behind her eyes, dreamless sleep. A formless void. The Trespasser is gone: even it, the specter beyond everything, has abandoned her.
Then something tugs on her hand. Not something. Someone. She opens her eyes and sees the young guy— David. The human lie detector. He clasps her hand and says, “You fucked up. You know that, right?”
She manages a weak nod. A groaning: “Unnh-huh.”
“They’re coming. Soon. To deal with you. But first, here.” He presses a napkin into her hand. “You have an infection. They won’t do anything for you. But I got you a few antibiotics. The doc won’t give them to you. Not yet. Here.” He helps her swallow two now, then shows her another bunch of them folded up in a napkin— a napkin he then explains he’s hiding underneath her. “She might change your bedding or check you for bedsores at some point— you’ll need to hide them better before then. I don’t know how. I’m sorry.” He looks over his shoulder. “Take two today. Two tomorrow. If I can, I’ll get you more, but . . .” He doesn’t have to say it: no promises.
Then David is up.
“Wait,” she says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Wait, please. Don’t fucking go anywhere. Hold . . . hold still.”
“I can’t.”
And then he’s gone.
She can feel the pills in her hand. She tucks them farther underneath her. Hand back out just as the tent flap opens again. A young soldier-looking kid with a mop of ginger hair and a starry band of freckles across his nose and cheeks pushes in a wheelchair, in which sits Karen Key. Behind them both comes Ethan.
“Sir?” the boy says.
Ethan cocks his head and dismisses him. The ginger scurries off.
He sighs. Pushes Karen closer— but not too close. Still five, six feet away. For his part, Ethan reaches over, pulls a chair over, and sits in it.
Miriam tries to focus on him.
And then she can see: he’s pissed.
And she can’t help it. She laughs. Laughs so hard she’s red in the face, and the red in his face matches her, and soon it’s a race between his rage and her hilarious anger— each of them a thermometer whose glass is about to pop.
Her laughs break down into hacking, wheezing, coughing.
She coughs into her hand.
The hand comes away flecked with red.
“Two of mine are dead,” Ethan says, finally.
Miriam says, “That’s your own fault, dickhead.” She coughs again. “How dumb do you have to be? I tell Mary where the boy is, and while you don’t trust me, somehow you trust her to get the right info? And all the while, you have David, a psychic fact-checker, under your nose, and you fail to deploy him?”
The address she gave Mary— and to Ethan, by proxy— was the wrong one.
She said to Mary, Gabby’s from Florida. She went home. Took him home to Miami. There’s a nightclub— Atake. They’re upstairs. Hiding out.
Of course, that’s also the nightclub where Tap-Tap ran, or still runs, his little empire of drugs and awfulness. The one that once belonged to a man named Ingersoll. A legacy of terrible people, and she sent two of Ethan’s people right into that squirming nest of venomous things.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Asshole.
She coughs again. More blood. But the smile on her face is huge.
“You’re a monster,” Ethan says.
She swallows— it’s like a cactus is sliding down her throat. “I see you’re a fan of irony.”
“You shot one of my men. Sent two more into the lair of an illegal immigrant’s drug den, got them killed. You failed to save Wade Chee. You don’t care about this country or the people in it. I’ve tried to be fair. I’ve tried to give you chance after chance after chance. Every time I reach out my hand, you smack it away—”
“Try again and I’ll bite each of your fingers clean off.” She clicks her teeth together— but she’s too weak to sell it. The gesture of a gentle nibble, not a chomping shark.
“You think we can’t hurt you.”
With that, he’s up, standing over her. His tosses the sheet off her, a sheet she tries to catch and rescue. Ethan takes his thumb, presses it down against the gunshot wound in her chest.
She screams.
The thumb pushes the bandage deeper into the wound. Until soon, his digit wears the gauze like a condom, and it plunges straight into the hole.
White light. Electric and blinding. The pain so strong, it’s less like pain and more like sound and heat— it’s all-encompassing, enveloping her like the river that once threatened to drown her. This, a river of fire. Burning her alive.
“This hurts,” he growls through gritted teeth. “And yet, Mary told me: pain, physical pain, it isn’t one of your weaknesses. You can take a hit. You’re too stubborn to care, too dumb to die, and so I’m just doing this because I want to.”
Then he yanks the thumb out. Slick with blood like he had it stuck down in the goo of a cherry pie. He shakes his hand.
Miriam tries not to sob. Tears don’t come. But her whole body is wr
acked with them just the same: dry-heaving, trying to vomit up something, except here it’s trying to cry, because at least crying would feel good.
“Just let me die, then,” she says. “Your bullet-head wife can . . .” She stifles a yelp of pain. “She can just read my dead brain and tell you what you want.”
He nods. “We may get there yet. But she’s not sure what lurks up here”— he raps on her head with his knuckles—“will be an open door for her. And once you are dead? There’s no going back. But you have an infection and it’ll take you sooner than later. So, you may get your wish. In the meantime, we’ve got ways to make you hurt. Mary says she knows your chains. She knows where you’re soft— where to stick the knife. Want a tease? Like a preview for a movie before it comes out? She saw a name. One name.”
No, no, no.
“Louis Darling.”
“No.” All the heat rises to her cheeks, her neck, her underarms—she can feel it coming off her in hellish waves. Her hands clutch the bedsheets and she tries to sit upright. “No!”
“Oh, yeah. We’ve got his name and won’t take long to find out where he’s living. Some of us are police, military, ex-IRS, ex-census. We’ll find his address. Then we’ll march up to his front door, and we’ll hurt him. Worse than we hurt you. And then you’re gonna give us the location of little Isaiah, or we’ll kill him.”
And there’s Ethan’s smile again.
Big and broad and terrible and full of callous certainty.
FORTY-NINE
THE STORY OF MOCKING-BIRD
Ants crawl along her arms. She can feel them but only sometimes can she see them. Little red ants, red as licorice, red as jellybeans, marching over her arms and arm hair in winding, trickling paths— when she swats at them, they bite, and she cries out and somewhere nearby, someone laughs. Someone on the other side of the tent. She tries so hard not to pay attention to the insects. Miriam wills herself to pretend they’re not there but they are— and then she thinks, Why are they here? She can’t feel all the parts of her body. Her feet seem like slabs of flesh lying at the end of her, like roasts of cooked meat. Are the ants hungry? Has she been abandoned? Is the camp deserted and she’s been left here to die?
Then she remembers: pills.
I have pills.
I need to take them.
I need them to survive.
She reaches under her body with a sliding hand, the hand not cuffed to the bed. The rest of her body is numb, without sensation— she can’t feel her own fingers probing.
Worse, she can’t find the pills.
Someone took them.
I’m going to die.
But then— her fingers touch something.
The edge of a napkin. There. She slides over it. Tugs on it. Eases it out. Feels the little bumps inside the napkin. Four pills. Take— how many was it?
Two. Take two pills.
She starts to fumble. Unwrapping the napkin carefully, with picking nails, nails that are bitten and broken. Between thumb and forefinger she presses two flat, round pills together like a sandwich, an ice cream sandwich that contains nothing sweet—but also nothing so sweet as an extension on her life, perhaps—and she extends her tongue. Like unrolling sandpaper. Pills onto the tongue. They stick. Gummy, gluey. She tries to swallow but they won’t go down. And then they start to taste sweet. Too sweet. Sugar sweet like candy.
David lied to me. These aren’t pills.
They’re goddamn stupid shit-ass candy. Tic Tacs or something.
Shit shit shit shit.
They’re just fucking with her now. They do know how to hurt her. How to break her down to little bits: a mortar and pestle turning her to powder.
But then the sweetness gives way to sharp bitterness— the medicinal bleed on the tongue. They are pills, she tells herself. But she’s not sure.
Miriam swallows them anyway. They make a miserable journey down her dry throat. And somewhere in the middle, they get stuck. She’s sure of it. They feel huge in her esophagus. Like pebbles crammed in a drinking straw.
She whimpers like a dying puppy.
She hates that she whimpers.
“You’re weak,” Wade Chee says. Standing there, all his body burned like a hot dog left too long over the charcoals. Flesh crispy and coming off, splitting in places (and in those splits and fleshy fissures she sees the bold red of blood and muscle). His teeth are bright. His eyes too. He says, “I was strong for you and I shouldn’t have been. You’re weak. You need to be strong.”
“I can’t. I don’t know how. Not anymore.”
“Then you’re going to die here. And then what?”
He laughs and is gone.
Voices outside the tent. A conversation between two people, maybe three:
“Bird’s down.”
“Flight 6757. Crashed in the desert. Pick its bones clean.”
“The corn will do it. The corn is thirsty for blood.”
A laugh. “This isn’t just blood. This is metal. These are souls.”
“Souls are like pennies: they number so many, they’re basically just garbage. Plentiful and cheap.” A cough. Wet and fungal.
“Cerulean warbler.”
“Crimson tanager.”
More laughing. Another cough.
“I think she’s listening.”
“Little chickadee.” Then words uttered through a mush mouth. Gibberish.
Laughter. She tries to scream. Can’t. Her jaw feels wired shut.
“Welcome to Hell, right?”
Ha ha. “Right.”
“Does she know we have Louis?”
“She will soon.”
“He’s practically dead.”
Miriam thrashes. Seizes up. Ants biting her. She thinks: This is how I’m going to die. An infection. Or maybe anaphylaxis. From ant bites. In the desert.
“Hey.” Pause. “Hey.” Beat. “Hey.”
Miriam feels the hand on her shoulder. There. Ofelia. One of the psychics here. The one who can . . . What can she do? Sex. She can increase the sex drive. Or make herself wanted. Or something. “You,” Miriam bleats.
“There’s a story,” Ofelia says, either biting her thumbnail or using her thumbnail to pick the space between her teeth. “It’s not a Tohono story; it’s, like, Hopi, maybe. I dunno.” That nail scrapes teeth. Like a shard of glass scraped down a blackboard. Miriam stiffens.
“What . . . what are you talking about?”
“Just sit there and listen. So, in the time before time, the people— that’s humans— were stuck in this dark place deep within the earth. The Underworld. Yeah? Like, Hell, but not the Hell with the Devil. A Hell for the living. So, they’re down there, and some of the people are good but a lot of them are bad. They’re driven mad by serpents. And they’re abusive. Bullies. Monsters. Rapists and killers. The bad people hurt the good people, and one day, the good people say: We have to get right the fuck out of here. You follow me?”
Miriam tries to say something but her mouth doesn’t work and those pills jammed down in her throat make it hard to speak— and then she thinks: Oh, fuck, the pills. She’s still got the napkin and the two pills held in her hand.
Quickly she closes her hand over them, a Venus flytrap catching a fly. She can’t have Ofelia see; she’d take them away.
These pills might be all she has to stay alive for a little while longer.
Ofelia seems to have not noticed. She keeps talking: “At this time, no sun existed. It was dark everywhere. So, it wasn’t like you could just look up and see the way out. They looked and looked, couldn’t find anything. Tried to grow trees and tall sunflowers to climb, but the plants were withered and weak and not tall enough. So, then a little bird came along. The Mocking-Bird. And the little bird said, like, I know I’m tiny, but I can help because I have these wings. And they did not believe the bird could help, but it’s not like the bird could hurt them, so they said, yeah, of course, sure, you go, little bird. You go, sinsonte. Volar alto, fly high. And th
e little bird did just that. And then was gone. Right? Time passes and all seems lost as the bad people continue to hurt the good ones. And then . . .”
Here, Ofelia spits something. The crescent sickle of a nibbled fingernail.
She continues: “And then the bird returns. Tells them it has found a way out. A hole in the Underworld. Too high up for anyone to reach, so Mocking-Bird teaches them a song to sing— all at once— that makes the trees and sunflowers grow so fast and so tall that they can climb out. And they do.” She sniffs and shrugs. “That’s just the beginning of the whole thing, but I thought you could use it. A little bird helps them find their way out of Hell.”
Miriam coughs. “Cool story, bro.”
Ofelia shrugs. “Yeah. I think you’re being a judgey bitch to me, which is cool because that’s sort of my jam too. We understand each other. I kinda hate you, which means I kinda dig you— like, I hate you because maybe we’re close. We’re more than a little alike. Survivors. So, can I give you a tip?”
“Just the tip?”
Ofelia makes a face. “Whatever, shut up. The tip is: you’re a survivor, so fucking survive already. Comes a point when you decide you gotta kill and eat the people you’re with if you’re gonna stay alive. Es hora de comer. Okay? Give us the kid’s location. We don’t wanna hurt him. He’s family. I love him. We all do. We’ll make sure he’s safe here.”
“I’m stubborn,” Miriam croaks. “Not happening.”
“Stubborn enough to die?”
Miriam manifests as much of a shrug as she can muster.
“I bet maybe you are,” Ofelia says, standing up. “But I’m telling you. You need to find your way out of Hell. Because the way out is gonna close, and when it does, you’ll be trapped in here with the rest of us.”
She starts to walk away.
Miriam thinks: Now hide the pills. Then: No, no, no, just wait till she leaves, she hasn’t noticed anything yet. But Miriam’s hand twitches—
And the pills roll off the napkin against the ground.
They tick and click as they land.
Ofelia stops.
