by Chuck Wendig
Around her, the ground rises in swells both jagged and gentle. Saguaro stand vigil. Pink blooms pop over prickly pears. Creosote reaches for the heavens— desperate fingers lined with little yellow flowers.
It’s beautiful out here, she thinks. Even though this isn’t her place. This is someone else’s kingdom. Sun and sky and spring flowers in a dry, dead desert. Given any other day, she’d be out here, smoking and scowling and talking shit about all the stupid splendor. Fuck this and piss on that and beauty is dumb and nice things are bad and rah, rah, rah. She doesn’t have it in her.
Today, she just thinks:
It’s really pretty here.
It’s probably because she’s dying.
She knows it. The cactus knows it. The whole of the cloudless sky knows it. It’s not a secret. She has one lung that inflates, but it’s like she’s being stabbed by a steak knife every time she breathes. Her feet feel like she’s been walking on cheese graters. The infection inside her is cooking her from the inside out. Her body feels like a rusty burn barrel. Everything charred and melting.
She has no idea where she is. She ran, then walked, and now does this undead shuffle through the wasteland. Nobody has come for her. Ahead lies something that looks like mountains, or at least really big, pointy hills. Not a city. Not a town. Is she heading north? South? East, west, up, down, anywhere at all?
No water. No food. No medicine.
I should’ve gotten the pill bottle.
And a Coke. And a hot dog.
And I should’ve just told them where Isaiah had gone. Let them all hang for it. Why do I care? She tells herself: I don’t care. I’m just too stubborn to give in. And it’s going to kill her. It’s really, truly, going to kill her. Not that she even knows where Isaiah is, exactly. She was worthless to them all along.
She drops to her knees.
Chest heaving gently. Anguish sticking with every breath.
Something tickles the back of her mind. She turns her head—slowly, so slowly— and there, on a gently bobbing branch of a creosote bush, is something she thinks at first is a red flower. But it’s no flower: it’s a bird. A vermilion flycatcher. She doesn’t know how she knows that. Over the last couple of years, she’s done a lot of reading about birds, flipped through guide after guide, and maybe this is just one of those pieces of information stuck in her mind the way a splinter gets in your finger— or maybe it’s something deeper than that, some deeper dive, some psychic nonsense that connects her with the bird. But then she wonders: Does the vermilion flycatcher think of itself as a vermilion flycatcher? Why would it? Why would the bird care what humans call it? Unless it does. Unless birds are here for people. Maybe all things are here for people. They’re the children of God and all that, and God made this place just for humans— or so the story goes— and here she laughs because if God is real? What an asshole.
“I need your help,” she says to the bird, and her words are a scratchy whisper, barely heard. The bird chips and trills at her. “You’re no mockingbird. But I need you to find the way out of Hell. Show me the way out.”
Chip, chip, trill. Chip, chip, trill.
Miriam falls forward.
PART SIX
* * *
THUNDERBIRD
INTERLUDE
THE COMING STORM
Ethan Key eats oatmeal out of a tin cup. Spoon noisily scraping the breakfast— a breakfast cooked too long, so it’s a little hard around the edges— off the metal sides. He sits on his back patio, staring off at the middle distance. Scanning the horizon for something, anything. He rescues a blackberry from inside the cup, eats it. Not sweet enough. Sour, acid tang.
In a fit of anger, he pitches the cup. Ten feet away, it lands with a clang and the remaining oatmeal splatters.
“You’re bundled up in knots,” Mary Stitch says. He startles. Flinching so hard, his neck seizes up— a kink bridging his shoulders like an electric current.
“Jesus, Mary,” he says. “Warn a man next time.”
Mary Stitch. Is she their savior or something much worse? He can’t tell yet. She’s not a true believer; that much is for sure. And he distrusts people who do things for money. Money is transitive. Barely even a real thing, just some proxy nonsense that represents not real value but, rather, measures desire.
What the hell does she desire, anyway?
“You’re still bent up like a coat hanger,” she says. “What happened, happened. You can’t change that. Regret isn’t worth a damn. You correct your mistakes and you move on—”
“Quit your goddamn lecturing. I don’t need it. I damn sure don’t want it.”
She pulls up a chair, sits. Sipping at a cup of coffee. “She’s dead.”
They both know the she that Mary means.
Miriam Black.
“We don’t know that,” he says. “We didn’t find a body.”
“It’s a lot of ground to cover out there. Lot of places she might’ve curled up and died. Under a rock. In some gulch. No way a girl survives out there. I saw the weakness inside her. Her body is strong, maybe stronger than anybody would give her credit for, but she was torn up inside and out.”
Ethan grunts. He taps the center of his chest. “But she’s strong here.”
Mary laughs, and that makes him even madder. He doesn’t like people laughing at him. But he lets it go because they’re so close; he doesn’t want to alienate her, not here, not now.
“That girl doesn’t even have a heart,” Mary says. “What she’s got in there is just a dried, dead bird’s nest sticky with waste. Blackened and foul. I should know. I got the same terrible thing in me.”
“So, tell me: how do you kill something that doesn’t have a heart?”
Another laugh, this one bitterer than the last. “Good question. Maybe you don’t.”
Ethan says what he’s thinking: “Everything’s gone south. She’s dead. David is dead.” And here his mind corrects him: No, you killed him. You shot David right in the head and now he’s dead. “We still don’t have the boy.”
“I told you not to bluff with that truck driver thing.”
“I’m not supposed to have regrets, but now you hit me with this I told you so bullshit? My mother was like that. She’d tell you not to worry, tell you to be a man, make your own decisions. Then you’d do your thing— and soon as you did, she’d tell you just how much you made everything worse. She said she was just trying to encourage us to make our own mistakes, except, truth is: all we did in her eyes was make mistakes. Maybe she saw our family as a mistake; I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. She’s dead and life goes on.”
Out there, over the desert, vultures turn and tumble in the sky.
Mary draws a deep breath and says, “That’s one of your weaknesses.”
“What?”
“Family.”
“Family is not a weakness.”
“It is for you, Ethan. You’ve created this idea of family in your head. Most of this started because your wife took a bullet and it changed her. So, you made this place, and now you see all these people as family, but that means they’re dependent upon you and you upon them. You think that’s community, but it’s just weakness. It means you’re not your own man.”
“You’re cruising,” he warns.
“You thought of David as a son and he betrayed you. And this fascination with the boy, Isaiah. You don’t need him. We’ve got the plan— a plan that has not gone south, a plan that is so close, you can almost smell the ozone before the lightning. You’re going to change things. You’re going to change this country.”
“Maybe,” he says. But they still don’t have the boy. And his wife— she won’t speak to him. She just sits there. In her room. Staring off. Mumbling to herself but not so he could ever hear what it is she’s saying. She’s frozen him out. And he knows why. Because he failed. He failed with Miriam. Failed with his bluff. Killed David. And still: no Isaiah.
“You’re thinking about that boy again,” she says
.
“Quit that, will you? It’s creepy.”
She smirks. “Thought you liked us changers. Us fancy psychic types.”
“All of ’em but you, Mary.”
She’s quiet for a while. Staring at him. Her eyes picking him apart like fingers pulling soft chicken off bendy bones. Suddenly, her face softens and she whistles a low sound. “That’s what it is.”
“That’s what what is?”
“You lost a child.”
He flinches again. “You don’t know that.”
“But I do,” she says. “Was Karen pregnant when she got shot?”
“No,” he says, mouth a firm line. “She lost the baby about a week before.”
“That’s a bad week.”
“You have no idea.”
“That’s your thing with family. That’s the thing with Isaiah—”
“Get the fuck out of here. Let me enjoy my breakfast—” He looks down at his empty hands. You already threw your breakfast out. “Let me sit here. Just let me sit here and stare out at nothing. We got a few more days left and, honestly, before that? I don’t want to see much of you.”
Mary stands up. The steam from her coffee rising around her like exorcised spirits. “I want to be there, by the by.”
“Be where?”
“Courthouse. When it all goes up.”
“No, uh-uh. I want you back here. Don’t get caught up in it.”
She sniffs, shrugs. “Fine. You don’t want it to go right, so be it.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, you want it done right, I need to be there. I know how it all goes and so I want to make sure it goes right. I got a reputation.”
“Mary Scissors.”
“That’s right.” She turns her free hand into a pair: snip, snip.
“Fine. You help them get set up before courthouse hours. But you don’t stick around. You understand? Those explosions go off and everything’s going to be under the microscope mighty damn fast.”
She nods. “Thank you.”
“Now go on, get out.”
She licks her lips, sips her coffee, then does as she’s told.
FIFTY-FOUR
THE ROADRUNNER AND THE COYOTE
The vulture wheels in the sky as if a tether connects one of its wings to a central point, an invisible axis around which it turns and turns. Heat breathed up from the hot desert, exhalations of sun-warmed air, push the bird higher and higher and higher. Another vulture joins it.
The mind of the first bird jumps. For a moment, consciousness is shared between them, a single awareness spread out between them like a ribbon of warm taffy— but then the mind snaps into place. From the first vulture to the next.
For a time, the mind was part of a vermilion flycatcher. A male bird. Red as fire, red as blood, a butterfly crushed in its beak. The bug delivered to another flycatcher, a female, perched on a saguaro. A gift of mating. A gift, rejected. A butterfly, eaten. Crunch, munch, crunch.
Time spent lazing about, for despite its name, the flycatcher is a lazy bird. The male in particular. Most of its time spent sitting. Watching. Waiting.
Dreaming.
Dreaming of a life not as a bird, but as something else. Something with long limbs and rubbery digits— a creature without beak and talon. Pink and featherless and fixed to the ground. With all the grace of a rolling rock.
Then the flycatcher flew. Day into night and into day. Then: a mockingbird, a gray and silver streak in the sky, ducking and diving. The flycatcher thought what an irony that would be, and then, not knowing what the fuck irony is except that it sought it utterly, it passed by the mockingbird and became that bird.
The flycatcher flew on. The mockingbird remained.
Stealing the songs of those it passed. Robbing the world of its sounds and repurposing them for its own: a trill, a chirp, a cell phone, a whistle, a beeping watch, things the mockingbird understood and remembered only peripherally— a distant memory that was maybe not its own. It finally settled on a song: a song that conjured new memories. A glimpse of one of those pink and featherless things flat on a table. Blood from its hands, almost black. A laurel garland of barbed wire. A larger bird-thing, leathery and reptilian, approaching.
The mockingbird pushed that song away. Then passed by the vultures, and now that’s what it is. A vulture. Its beak and throat slick with rancid meat— a pleasurable sensation, death made perfect and pure because there, then, the purpose of death laid bare: death is here to feed life. A thing dies and it becomes food for other things. Fresh food or fertilizer. Broken down, chewed by teeth, smashed by beaks, torn apart by fingers of rain and claws of cutting wind, life into death into life. A purpose to the whole thing. The vulture just one part of it.
Seems so obvious now. But the pink, featherless things don’t grasp it.
So, for now, the vulture is one vulture, then another, then a third. Then it is all of them at once. Circling. The musky smell of sweat and blood rising up off the desert, so it finds those invisible vapors pointing down like arrows and it follows the arrows as they fall— trailing the stink, seeking the dead thing.
There, a body.
Pink and featherless.
Its hair mostly black, but streaked with color.
A woman.
It’s familiar to the vulture.
Other vultures have gathered too. Like a parliament of judges in their black robes. Standing vigil, pondering after justice.
One vulture, different from the others. Different as she is herself, different. This one has a puckered hole where its eye once was. Its other eye is not a bird’s eye at all but something altogether more . . .
Human.
“The body’s not dead yet,” that vulture says. After every word, the click-a-clack of its beak. “What was it the woman in the chair said? Oh. Right.” And here the vulture’s voice changes to a woman’s voice: “Death doesn’t see you.”
That one-eyed vulture stoops and bends its long neck, and nudges the body with its gray, hooked beak. The body twitches. The back rises and falls.
The pink featherless thing is alive.
Something pulls at the mind— at the vulture herself, like a kind of gravity, drawing her mind deeper, closer, unmooring it from the scavenger bird and toward the pink, featherless almost-corpse—
No.
The vulture doesn’t want to see this, doesn’t want to think about it. If this human is not yet dead, then it may fight, and right now the vulture wants easy prey. This human is not good for eating, and if it is not good for eating, then what good is it?
Angry, scared, the vulture takes flight.
The one-eyed bird calls after: “Time is fleeting. The body is dying. Death will see it soon, if it has not yet.”
But the vulture doesn’t care. (Doesn’t want to care.)
It soars, pushed higher by hands of heat.
There. Another bird. Smaller, darting, ducking. A bird that knows how to eat, and now: the vulture twists and the mind stretches and—
A shrike. Small bird, lean like a laser, mean like a razor, already on the hunt. And it has a peculiar way of hunting, doesn’t it? A songbird with a murderous melody in its heart, and so the shrike sees prey and sees it fast: a little lizard scuttling from one rock to the next. It dives. Talons out.
The little songbird picks up the lizard. Lifting it up, up, up—
It slams it back down.
Stab. Onto the spines of a cactus. The lizard, impaled. Still wriggling. Mouth working soundlessly. The shrike is hungry, and so it eats— pecking and pulling at the helpless animal. It relishes its meal. So much so that it wants more: and so, in the remainder of the day and into the night, it captures a grasshopper, a moth, even a small mouse, and it does the same each time: up and then down, pinning it to the cactus and feasting. Its little gray breast flecked with fresh red.
She moves from hunter to hunter, then. She becomes an owl eating mice, a peregrine who flies high and then drops stra
ight down, catching a rock dove in the air and killing it before it even hits the ground, a woodpecker tearing bugs from cactus meat, a wren plucking the limbs off a daddy longlegs, and then she thinks, I want to eat a scorpion. And so come morning, she finds her way into the body of a roadrunner— fast feet, sharp beak.
All day it runs and it hunts.
She— it?— kills a rattlesnake, picking it up and thrashing the serpent against a rock until its skull breaks. It spears a horned lizard, eating it in reverse so the hooks and spikes go down the bird’s throat and do not catch there. And then it sees a scorpion: gold and almost translucent, legs clicking, tail twitching. The scorpion ducks and darts. The roadrunner moves fast. Head snapping forward. Spearing it. Crushing it. Eating it. The venom does nothing.
The bird is swift and deathless.
The roadrunner looks up.
There sits a coyote.
And here again: the idea of irony, though the roadrunner doesn’t know what that means or why it’s thinking of it.
(Beep-beep.)
The coyote is a mangy, sick thing. Its fur slick, its teeth yellow. Familiar to her is its one eye— the missing eye a rotten crater, the other eye unsurprisingly human. The coyote blinks and pants. Then laughs. Heh, heh, heh.
Behind the coyote: the body. Vulture still sitting there. Waiting. For what, though? The body must still be alive.
The roadrunner has come full circle. By accident? Or on purpose?
Above, the late-day sky darkens. Clouds gathered close over the sun. Somewhere in the deep distance, thunder rumbles like a hungry belly.
“You need to come back,” the coyote says.
The roadrunner cocks its head like a bewildered dog.
“The storm is coming. Once it passes, the body is dead,” the mangy, maybe-dead coyote says. A worm crawls out of its gone eye. “Death has passed you over again and again, blind to you. Ten years ago, you were marked. Death thought it took you already. You gave it a life. Not your own. Fooled it, you did. But soon, it’ll figure it out. Fate will find you. Fate and Death are the same thing, you see. It hunts. Roaming closer and closer.”
