Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  And the roadrunner thinks a thought that is distinctly not very birdlike: Well, so fucking what? The bird expects the body to die. Thought it already should’ve been dead, to be honest. And then it can truly be free. The roadrunner can do this forever. Go from one body to another. Bird to bird to bird. Never trapped by mere meat and bone. Flying, running, hunting, swooping, soaring, falling. Immortality, red in feather and beak.

  Another boom of thunder somewhere far away.

  The roadrunner turns to run—

  But the coyote stands in its way. Head stooped. Teeth bared. Mealy tongue licking along its rotten choppers. “You can’t run this time.”

  The roadrunner thinks: Running is what I am and what I do.

  The coyote answers: “But you’re not a roadrunner, are you? Miriam, it’s time.” Another thunder-tumble. The gray clouds have gone black. Far off, the mountains disappear behind a haze: rain falling there.

  When the roadrunner looks, the coyote is no longer a coyote. It’s a big man, broad shoulders. Sandy hair and a trucker hat. One eye ruined. Then it’s a young woman with a carved-up face, the scars once red, once pink, now pale as the veins of a ghostly body. Then a little boy holding a red Mylar balloon. Then a little boy in a Superman costume, cape and everything. Then an older woman with a sneering face, her eyes framed by long gray hair, a pair of shining scissors in her hand with which she cuts at the air. She says, “Poor Miriam.”

  In the roadrunner’s chest, something burns like a hot coal.

  “Lying.” A gunshot.

  Hands around her throat. Gun to her head.

  A series of explosions, above to below.

  Brick, fire, death.

  “Other people. It’s them that make you weak. Connected to them. Tethered and chained, boat anchors holding you still . . .”

  The roadrunner thinks: I’m not connected anymore. I’m strong.

  But the coyote shakes its musky, stink-slick head.

  “That isn’t right,” it growls. “It’s not people that make you weak. It’s people that make you strong. It’s time to come back for them, Miriam. Not for you, maybe. But for them. Come home. Back to the meat, bones, and blood of the human condition. Come home.”

  Lightning strikes as thunder kicks a hole in the sky. And rain falls through, hard and heavy and mean. And when it does, the roadrunner runs.

  And Miriam— the body lying there, face forward in the dirt—gasps and shudders and cries out with a wordless sound.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  SHADOWS

  Blink, blink, blink.

  Miriam snaps to awareness. Nothing makes sense, not at first. Her world bucks and bangs, sending jolts up through her spine to the base of her neck. Everything is dark, and everything hurts. Shapes sit around her, to her left, to her right, across from her. Human shapes. But gathered there like—

  Like a parliament of vultures.

  Her brain, still loose and frazzled like the torn and tattered end of a shirt sleeve, thinks: That’s not the right word; it’s a parliament of owls, not a parliament of vultures, and yet that’s what they looked like— a ruling body, a gathering of judges or politicians, waiting to make a vote . . .

  They seem to have made their decision.

  Or maybe she’s the one who cast the clinching vote.

  “Who are you?” she calls out into the darkness.

  “Hot shit, she’s awake,” a man’s voice says. A shadow stretches long near her, and a small light clicks on. Five figures sit near her inside some kind of vehicle— something military-looking. One person on each side of her. Three across. Four men, one woman. All in dusty desert camo. The one who turned on the light has a bristly boot-brush mustache, black as soot: “Miss?”

  “Fuck. Fuck. What.” She draws a deep, panicked breath. She feels suddenly trapped, her skin crawling. “What’s happening?”

  She’s got a water bottle. Clutched between her knees and steadied by her hands. Quickly, she takes a long gulp. It’s cold and yet it burns at the same time.

  “We found you,” the man says.

  The woman leans forward. She’s got small, dark eyes like black stones and a nose long and flat like the blade of an axe. As she leans closer, the gear on her belt— flashlight, knife, little grenades the size of Red Bull cans— rattles. “The cartel do this to you? Ma’am. Ma’am. You a mule? You got drugs on you? Where you hiding it? Hnnh? Start talking now, maybe we can end up friends.”

  “The fuck. No.” Miriam coughs. “No, that’s not it—”

  Bootbrush says to the woman: “Nez, cool it. She doesn’t fit the profile.”

  The woman— Nez?— shrugs, leans back. Arms crossed. Staring.

  Next to Miriam, one of the men— Latino, maybe, with a pencil-thin mustache, leans forward and hands Bootbrush a little black flashlight.

  “Thanks, Donnie,” Bootbrush says. He clicks on the flashlight, passes it in front of Miriam’s eyes— just as the vehicle they’re in takes a hard hit and pulls sharply right. Miriam almost lands in Donnie’s lap. Bootbrush clicks the flashlight off. “Ma’am, my name is Ken Kescoli. That’s Dana Nez, Donnie Begay, Jim Lopez, and Octavio Kino.” Jim’s got messy hair and a huge grin decorating a round red baby face— a face so red, it’s like he’s not only been out sitting in the sun but is, perhaps, the sun itself. The one on the other side of her, Octavio, is handsome in ways people shouldn’t be: almost too perfect, like he was formed by the wind and the water over a thousand years. “You can’t see him right now, but we got Hal Curtis driving— you know our names now. Do you remember yours?”

  She does.

  That fact surprises her a little.

  “Miriam,” she says.

  Bootbrush continues: “Hi, Miriam. You got a last name?”

  She does. She doesn’t say it. The man keeps on talking:

  “We’re a group of trackers working for ICE— that’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Okay? We found you out at the edge of the Tohono reservation. You’re in pretty rough shape, so we’re going to take you to a hospital, get you looked at, then we’ll have a chat—”

  “If we don’t get drowned in this gullywasher,” Lopez says, still smiling.

  Bootbrush nods. To her he says, “Got some bad weather out here. Storm coming through. Floods, so we’re just trying to make our way back out.”

  “No,” she says. “I’m not . . . I can’t. I’m not hurt.”

  But she is. She knows she is. The pain that runs through her is— well, it’s different now. Not vibrant and alive like it was before. Now it’s bigger, broader, but duller, too. Hidden: buried under rock and dirt. She instinctively reaches under her filthy shirt to feel for the bullet wound in her chest and—

  She finds something dry and bristly there. Dried grass, stitched in and out of her skin, sealing the wound and—

  Thunder rumbles, lightning flashes. She sits up in the desert, gasping. A crow hops onto her belly, another onto her shoulder. With its beak it flips up her shirt, then crawls underneath it, its talons scrabbling to gain a foothold, and she tries to pull the bird out, but then its beak plunges into the wound in her chest and she screams. The bird’s head works in and around, rooting. She feels air hissing out of her, blood rising up, and then it’s back out again. The pain is like the bang of thunder, the flash of electric across the sky. The crow turns its head and something glistens in its beak. A mushroomed piece of lead, slick with red. It flicks its head and the bullet lands somewhere with a pock. The other crow has a wad of dried grass in its mouth, and the other pokes at it, and the two of them again approach her, and again they go to work, both beaks going stitch, stitch, stitch—

  Did that happen?

  Or did she just imagine it?

  The grass in the wound . . .

  “I’m fine,” she says. “I don’t need a hospital.”

  The woman, Nez, looks her up and down. “Lady, you need a fuckin’ hospital. You look like you were just born. All that blood. Did someone rape you? You
can tell us. Cartel men? Coyote? Bandits, smugglers, crazy desert motherfuckers, who?”

  Donnie gives her knee a slight kick. “Hey, let her chill. Besides, we’re not cops— let’s just get her out of here.”

  “It was a . . . cult,” Miriam says. “Not a cult. A group. A militia.”

  Octavio says with a smirk and a flourish of his hands, “A lot of those around here, miss. United States is the land of the free, but Arizona is the land of the fuckin’ fruitbats.”

  “They . . . I can take you to them. They’re, they’re . . . north of here? High-clearance vehicles only. Road not maintained. I’m trying to remember—”Another hard bang as the truck dips. Rain hammers the roof. “Grave Gulch Road.”

  “I know where that is,” Nez says.

  “We’re not doing that,” Bootbrush says. “This storm is bad. You need help, and we need to get out of this desert.”

  She says as it hits her: “You’re the Shadow Wolves.”

  “That’s right,” Bootbrush says.

  “See?” Octavio says to Nez, elbowing her. “I told you people know who we are. We’re famous. Basically.”

  Donnie says, “Nobody knows who we are. People in this country are about as dim as a bulb can get before it’s gone dark. They don’t even know where to vote, or what’s in their food, or what rights they have—”

  A hard brake. Everyone lurches forward. The truck dips forward and there’s a loud metal bang and a ggggg grinding sound just after.

  Then everything is still.

  “What the shit,” Nez says.

  A little panel between the back of the truck and the separated driver’s seat slides open. A set of brown eyes stares out. Someone (who must be Hal Curtis) says through the slot, “Way ahead is flooded. Front end is down in a ditch, too, gonna need some pushers.”

  “Piss,” Octavio says.

  “Time to get wet,” Lopez cackles.

  “One of you makes another joke about my pussy,” Nez says, “ and I take out my knife and collect your balls as trophies.”

  Bootbrush stands and pops the back door. The others pull on floppy-brimmed hats and hop out as he waves them on.

  Rain hits Miriam in the face. The gray day pulses with lightning, and the rain sound is a ceaseless roar. As Bootbrush goes to be the last one out, he holds up the flat of his hand: “Stay here. Won’t be long. Gotta get the truck up and then scout a new way. Then we’ll get you safe.”

  He hops out. Slams the door behind him.

  Miriam sits.

  Up front, the truck lurches in reverse as they push it. The engine goes. Tires spin. Their voices almost lost behind the sounds of the storm.

  She doesn’t want to go to the hospital.

  Vultures standing around her as the crows stitch. A hawk perching on a nearby cactus as the first raindrops start to fall. A little shrike flitting about. A mockingbird mocking her. Like a princess from a Disney movie— except instead of dressing her, they’re dressing her wounds. And waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  A dark shadow passes in front of the gray sun.

  She looks across and someone is sitting there.

  Louis. Not-Louis. Trespasser.

  An oddly comforting sight. For now.

  “Do-overs and come-backs ain’t free,” he says, extending his tongue. A scorpion dances on it. He bites it in half, lets the bits squirm between clamped teeth. She remembers what the scorpion tastes like. She remembers what it all tastes like: lizard, mouse, butterfly, even Ashley Gaynes as the gannets tore him down to the studs and struts, to the bones and sinew. “You owe. We got work to do.”

  “I know,” she says.

  Miriam opens the door, quiet as she can, and ducks out into the storm.

  INTERLUDE

  KAREN KEY

  The rain has stopped. The clamor of the storm is far off, now. Karen Key’s head lolls. She sits in her chair by their bed, in their little house here in the middle of the compound. Her body is broken but her mind is sharp— many shards of a shattered mirror, each a cutting weapon. Ethan kneels before her, his head in her lap as he likes to do, and he cries softly, and with one slow, shaking hand she strokes his hair as she is wont to do— or was, until recently, when she refused to touch him or even look at him. But now, everything is in motion, all pieces are in play, and one by one, the dominos tip into each other, click, click, click. The sound of cards in bicycle spokes, of poker chips rattling, of everything falling apart but also falling into place. Soon now. Soon.

  She hears thoughts— stray thoughts, snippets snatched out of the air like music heard down a city street, like the smell of food from a faraway restaurant carried on the wind— and she takes these thoughts and brings them into her. Most stray thoughts are worthless and shallow—

  why does it have to rain today of all days

  stupid bitch won’t let me see my kids people don’t know how dads have it

  am I drinking enough water probably not

  this coffee tastes like shit but I’m still drinking it

  gets hotter earlier every year

  — because most people are worthless and shallow but they give her comfort just the same: because she is not those things. Karen is better now. Wasn’t once. Is now. Thanks to a bullet in her brain.

  at least it’s not a dust storm

  ate too many donuts

  Mexican pieces of shit

  People think about simple, meaningless things all day: weather, food, momentary comfort, cigarettes, candy, a pebble in the shoe, whether you left the oven on or put the flag up on the mailbox. But once in a while, people reveal themselves more completely: a worry over cancer, a fear of strangers, a violent urge, a sexual thrill so strong and so secret, it threatens to plunge Karen into darkness. Most brains are a boring soup until a truly interesting ingredient rises to the surface, borne forth on so many bubbles. Even insipid thoughts can be revealing: a worry over rain or heat parlays into a fear of global warming and an anxiety over death and control; a stray thought about food reveals worries over cancer or diabetes, hypochondria rising like a hungry beast, and again that familiar, persistent, universal fear of death; a desire for momentary comfort shifts and becomes a question of whether one even deserves it.

  How deep the rabbit hole goes.

  Karen cannot go so deep. Not unless they die. And then, for a time, while the mind and soul linger, she can go all the way down. Like she did with Wade Chee. Like she’s done with smugglers and mules and thieves. She did it with David when he died— not because he had secrets (though he did), but only because it’s how she honored his sacrifice. He was a good boy. Driven to destroy himself, though, as many are: a self-destructive urge, an obsession, an addiction, to picking scabs and letting the liar blood flow.

  She wanted Miriam Black to die so that she could crawl around that mind like a worm in the dirt. Cover herself in it. But she’s never tried to dive deep into the mind of a changer, a psychic, someone with power like hers. Even surface thoughts from those never come easy— it’s less plucking moths from the air and more breaking icicles off gutters. A sharp snap, cold in the hand.

  Miriam was supposed to be an ally in all of this.

  Though she was, in a way. Unwittingly so.

  That name, Mary Stitch.

  A horrible woman. But such power.

  Everything will soon be different. Karen knows that now. A necessity. The world must be moved. It takes more than a small effort to do that. It takes a swift hand. Violent and strong and sure. Motivated by truth and honor.

  If they cannot succeed, the end is coming. She is sure of it. The vision she saw there at her own end, upon her death and resurrection: America, burning. Cornfields on fire. Sickness in the streets. The people poisoned by their own food and by each other. Red parachutes in the sky: invasion. Dead people in the streets: plague. The stars-and-stripes cut to ribbons and burned for warmth as a long winter sinks its teeth in and never lets go. A certainty of this future lives in her heart.
And she knows it’s our fault. Our weak leadership. Our socialist regime. America bent over like a drooping flower, its bloom begging to be deadheaded.

  That course of action will be long and hard, and it has begun.

  They will succeed because they are just and they are right.

  New people have begun to show up. People who have heard about them on the Internet or through whispers. They’re a group who is really going to change things. They are the storm that’s coming. A storm that will sweep through this country, cleaning out the trash, drowning the weak, washing the slate clean.

  For a moment: a feeling of triumph and satiety.

  But then: something tickles the back of her brain stem, something scratching there like a hungry rat. “Something . . . is . . . wrong,” she says, her mouth struggling to speak the words that come so easy inside her mind.

  Ethan pulls his head off her lap— him weeping because of what he’s done, what they’ve done, and what must come— and he sniffs and wipes his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. “What do you mean?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . know. Get . . . Ofelia.”

  A ripple out there somewhere. The thoughts of those around suddenly peaking like a sharp spire of static—

  Ethan stands, starts to move, but then he’s frozen in place—startled by a fluttering black shadow at the window.

  A crow. Or a raven. Is there a difference? This one is bigger. Its beak, all black. The feathers at the back of its head almost squared away at a granite-block angle. The bird opens its bill. It croaks— wawk wawk wawk.

  Then on the glass: tap tap tap.

  Behind it, another black, fluttering shape.

  The thoughts from all those around in the compound begin to focus.

  They begin to find common theme.

  that’s a big bird

  they’re probably gonna shit on the greenhouse

  look at them all

  maybe the storm spooked them

  The light coming through the window— gray, but tinged with the renewed sun— suddenly dims, darkens. A rush of sound like rain, but one Karen knows isn’t rain, isn’t storm, isn’t thunder: