Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  It’s birds.

  FIFTY-SIX

  CHOOSER OF THE SLAIN

  Miriam walks.

  The rain falls hard at first— like a castigation from a vengeful God hoping to once more drown the people of the Earth and start all over again. But she knows that this storm will be over soon. Birds avoid storms— it’s one of the things she knows from reading about birds but also from flitting around inside their bodies. A storm comes and birds seek its margins, traveling along the borders of it or finding shelter in a tree or under a rock.

  And so, they know the margins of this storm too.

  This one is passing east.

  Miriam is walking north.

  North is where the camp is. The compound. Ethan’s people. She knows this because the birds know this. They go there sometimes for food— where people are, food is plentiful. Seeds spilled out of a bag. Scraps of bread fallen from a sandwich. A greenhouse full of fruit and vegetables. The birds know how to eat. People know how to unwittingly feed them.

  And so, Miriam walks.

  Soon, the rain stops.

  In the distance, she can see it— the shape of the buildings. The angled roof of the greenhouse. A few cars and trucks— big trucks now, like tractor trailers pulled in between buildings. Houses and trailers.

  She thinks: This is for Isaiah. This is for David. But most important: it’s to stop what’s to come, the death of a courthouse full of people. An event, too, that is surely not the end of the Coming Storm but just the first cannon-boom of thunder.

  And Miriam thinks selfishly, If I stop them, then I save Mary.

  Mary, who is as much a monster as the rest of them. Worse, maybe. Smart and cruel and irretrievably broken. If Miriam’s salvation is to come from this woman— and it may not— then she has to stop the bombing.

  Miriam looks around her. The birds are starting to gather. Crows in the branches of creosote. Ravens perched on saguaros. Hawks and vultures in the sky: the hawks dipping and diving, the vultures merely gliding. Shrikes and blackbirds and mockingbirds. A red flash from a vermilion flycatcher. The ochre belly of a goldfinch. The flitting shape of a cactus wren. More flying in. Dozens at first, then twice that, then twice that. And still some coming as she walks.

  Her mind is fractured. Like Miriam’s persona is a mirror chipped at the edges— bits of her reflective glass buried in each bird. She is within them all and yet remains in her own body too. She shares in them and maybe, just maybe, the birds share in her, too.

  It scares her. Turns her blood to cold piss, turns her piss to blood, turns her stomach into a clutching fist. This isn’t human. She knows that. As she walks and the birds follow— as her mind follows with them, peripherally— she tries not to shake. But she does. Wet and cold and scared, she shakes. And yet she doesn’t stop.

  Bare feet on rock. The soles of her feet are cut up— but scabbed over, callused now, like her body has urged healing beyond what should be possible. The gunshot wound in her chest— stitched with dead grass. Stitched by birds, unless that was a hallucination. At this point, who can tell? Her belly, scabbed over. Everything hurts. But even so, she feels light, buoyant.

  Like a balloon with some helium left, just drifting along the ground.

  Some of her birds have already gone ahead to the camp.

  She gets there soon after.

  The fence awaits. Tall, chain link, razor wire facing outward like claws ready to cut her apart. But she already knows the fence is warped and weak, and the ground here is shallow and the posts are probably not in as deep as they should be, and so all she has to do is wish for the fence to go away and—

  Vultures dip and dive. Big birds, vultures.

  Heavy birds.

  One by one, they slam into the fence. The chain link rattles like sleigh bells every time they hit— one after the other, each a little feathered wrecking ball, flying up and then back and then swooping forward. Some grow bloody. One’s neck breaks and it drops, and Miriam flinches and looks away— a little piece of herself ripped out of it and she feels the pain.

  Still, the fence stands.

  But soon, the birds adopt a new tactic. They do not hit it one by one, but all of them— vultures, blackbirds, ravens, songbirds— fly to it and cling to the side the way a woodpecker hangs to a tree. They swarm the fence so that she can’t even see through it— just a writhing mass of feathers, black punctuated with hits of bright color, and the birds rock and lean and squawk and chirp and scream—

  The fence leans forward. One post pops out of the ground, then another.

  As it drops, the birds take flight. The chain link hits the ground with a crash and clamor.

  Miriam walks over it. The metal cold underneath her feet.

  Somewhere, someone laughs, but someone else cries out in alarm— she can hear them a little bit, not just with her own ears but with the ears of her feathered friends swooping about.

  What’s with all these birds?

  Holy shit, call somebody!

  This isn’t right. This is payback for what we’ve done. . . .

  Miriam walks through the same greenhouse she ran through when she left this place. Nobody’s here. Empty now. The plants have been moved. They’re readying for something. To leave, maybe— smart; once they hit the courthouse, people will come. Or maybe they’re hunkering down. Sheltering in place. Getting ready for the siege that will come. Waco. Jonestown. Ruby Ridge.

  Above, through the Plexiglas roof, the darting shapes of birds.

  Not just birds. Her birds.

  In through the greenhouse, then back out again. The camp ahead. A few tractor-trailers parked. Windows being boarded up. Someone’s pulling rolls and coils of fence out the back of one truck: so, they’re staying, then. Digging in.

  Miriam watches for a little while. A woman sets a box of what looks to be canned goods down at her feet and stares up at the birds— birds who are now alighting upon rooftops and windows, on the tops of trucks and fence rolls. A Hitchcockian apocalypse. Two men with black rifles slung over their shoulders watch too. One laughs. The other doesn’t look so amused.

  A third man— young, white, hair as ginger as a gingerbread cookie— comes out of a nearby trailer, a pistol at his hip and boards under his arm.

  He sees Miriam.

  She sees him.

  It takes a moment for who she is to register on his face. Like he can’t quite parse what he’s seeing— and oh, my, how bad she looks. She can see herself through the eyes of her birds: she looks like the Devil ate her and shat her back out, through bowels lined with cactus needles. It hits him then. His face unfreezes and his eyes go big as the realization goes supernova in his eyes.

  The boards drop with a clatter.

  His hand goes to his hip, fumbling with the gun.

  He’s slow. Way, way too slow.

  Miriam merely needs to blink.

  A black shape flits in front of him. Just under his chin. There’s a feathery flutter followed by a spray of red, and his throat is open. Red like a gash sliced in a blood orange, juice dribbling out.

  He lifts the gun but it drops out of his hand.

  It happened so fast, so wordless, so quiet, that nobody else has even noticed. And so, as this young ginger lad drops to his knees, Miriam walks over to him. Picks up the gun. Now the woman with the canned goods at her feet sees Miriam. And the shuddering body at her feet, blood pooling.

  The woman cries out. Turns to run.

  The two men with guns— one Latino guy shorn bald, the other a white guy with a slobby spare tire around his middle and a big red beard— turn, not sure what they’ll see, and damn sure not expecting to see Miriam standing there.

  They raise their rifles.

  Miriam already has her gun trained— the pistol bucks in her hand. She’s not a great shot, but it’s enough: the bullet clips the man in the arm, staggering him. The rifle pulls from his hands as he cries out.

  The other one fires. />
  Miriam is already moving.

  The gun chatters: semiauto. Pop-pop-pop-pop. She goes to duck behind the front end of a tractor trailer, bullets pinging into the grill—

  But then it stops. The man cries out, a warbling shriek—

  Miriam doesn’t need to look to know. She can feel the little peregrine falcon tearing into the man’s face with ease and delight, the way it might rend another smaller bird— a grackle, perhaps— asunder.

  Eyes pop under claws. Nose pushed inward by stabbing beak. A lip ripped off, wetting the scream rising up from his throat.

  More yelling now. More people coming out of doors. Out from the backs of trucks. Up from the lot, from the trailers, from the tents.

  Good. Let them come.

  Deep breath. Eyes closed.

  The rainstorm is over. But a new storm is here. It’s like squeezing a trigger— simple, gentle, a small action with massive consequence.

  The birds descend from the sky. Or fly down from the buildings, the trucks, the power lines ahead. They scream and trill. A cacophony of birds, their individual cries lost to the larger din.

  Miriam steps out from the front of the truck. She walks forward, looking for her true prey: Ethan, Karen, Mary, Ofelia. Nearby, a tall man with a sawed-off shotgun swipes at a goldfinch whirling into his face. Miriam lifts the pistol and shoots him. His head jerks. Blood pops. He’s down.

  Another man on the ground. Two hawks rising and falling against him. Talons down. Beaks biting. Bits of red lifted up. His middle a mess. A loop of bowel lifted high. Miriam kicks his gun away and keeps walking.

  Somewhere, glass shattering. People screaming. Gunfire chattering. An older man, cheeks like a cratered moon, teeth like broken rocks, runs at her with a knife— but something hits him in the face, something gray and red and furry. A dead rabbit. Flung by a prairie falcon. The man swats at the dead animal, distracted, as the bird descends upon him.

  Other people run from the birds. A raven on the back of one woman’s neck, its beak plunging in and out. A crow pinwheeling into a young man’s face. A fat fuck on the ground, his knee skinned almost to the bone, turning around and firing a revolver in the air like it’ll do any good at all.

  Miriam walks through all of it like a tourist.

  Ahead, she sees Ethan’s house. She goes around back, the terror-stricken cries of men and women lost to the cackling cacophony of angry birds. Miriam thinks to go in through the back patio, but there she finds the patio has been boarded up. Plywood nailed over it. Over some— but not all— of the windows, too.

  One of those will do.

  She barely has to will it— just a slight mental twitch of her psychic trigger finger— and a serpentine trail of dark birds rises up over his house like a lashing whip, a dread tendril. The roller coaster of ravens and crows goes up, twists, and then dives back down behind the house—

  They form a singular point and crash in through one of the unprotected windows. A funnel of birds, twisting like a whipping snake. In through that space. Miriam feels them penetrate and invade. Landing on coffee tables, couches, perching on countertops, pecking at a loaf of bread left out, wings knocking photos off walls. Flying through the halls and doorways and rooms.

  Until: there. Her target. Or one of them? Found.

  Miriam climbs in through the window: a trespasser. She creeps in through the swiftly made wreckage of the house. Bird shit streaking the walls. Scratches in the paint and wallpaper from beak and claw.

  She wanders down the back hallway. Toward the last bedroom. Ethan sits on the bed. Unarmed. Hands flat against his knees. He’s scared. He should be. In this room: forty-two birds. Mostly crows and ravens. A few raptor birds and songbirds. One owl perched on a dresser, tufts like devil horns up over its head as its yellow eyes watch his every move.

  Miriam steps in. His legs are shaking.

  She says: “You thought the apocalypse was a ways off. But here it is, Ethan. All around you. Turns out you had your eyes on the wrong revelation. I’m the end of your world. Me.”

  “H . . . how are you alive?”

  “Your wife said it. Death doesn’t see me. Not yet, and not easily.” She shrugs, and chews on her lower lip. “I’m one tough noogie, dude.”

  He shakes his head. Rubs some grit into his voice. “Why even come back? Why not just leave us alone?”

  “You know why.”

  “The boy.”

  “Not just him. Everything. All that you do and want to do. Him, David, the courthouse, Mary. Me. I hate you. I want you gone. Gone before you can hurt all those people.”

  She watches the fear leave him. Like a ghost peeling away from a body gone dead: a fog lifting. His frown turns upside down. The old grin, that smirky twist, opens up and now he’s laughing, just laughing like this is the funniest joke he’s ever told. Miriam laughs too, because why not? Why not enjoy the absurdity of it all? Before, at the Caldecott estate— and later, on a boat with Ashley Gaynes— she couldn’t control what she was or what she could do, but now she can. She’s given something up: some dream, some idea of herself, a bit of humanity (because being human is overrated, anyway), and now here she stands. Doing what she was meant to do. In a crass menagerie of hungry, mad-eyed birds.

  “You don’t get it,” he says.

  “I get it just fine.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re too late.”

  An icicle in her gut stabs and twists. “What?”

  “It’s over. The bombs went off an hour ago. Those people are dead.”

  Her knees almost buckle. The birds shuffle and shudder. Beaks clicking. A low flurry of squawks and warbles rise from the gathered parliament.

  Mary’s dead.

  Quintero.

  The woman at the desk. The man at the copier.

  Cops, lawyers, officers, criminals, judges, everybody.

  “You’re lying,” she hisses.

  “I’m not. You’ve been gone weeks. We thought you were dead.” The smile stays on his face. A cold smile carved into cemetery granite. “And the boy, hoo boy, Miriam. We have Isaiah, too.”

  “Bullshit. Bullshit.”

  “A nice stranger dropped him off today. Found him all alone. Your friend abandoned him. The corker is: the boy wanted to come here. We’re what he knows. We’re his family and he figured that out.” Ethan pauses. Sizes her up. “You wanna see him?”

  “I want you to die.”

  A sound behind her. The birds turn, move to fly— already Miriam can see through their eyes what’s coming. Karen. Karen Key. Hiding in a goddamn closet with Ofelia right behind her. Ofelia with a gun— a small pistol.

  Her birds take swift wing. They swarm— Ofelia starts firing the pistol, bang, bang, bang.

  Miriam’s leg jerks, the knee suddenly bent, and she falls hard.

  Fresh blood down the meat of her thigh.

  A red snow shovel slams hard against her back— face against tile—

  She tries to stand, ignoring the pain— death doesn’t see you, not yet, not today— and she takes the pistol, the one she stole from that ginger kid, and points it at Ethan. Ethan, who launches himself at her. His shoulder under her chin: teeth clamp down on her own tongue, mouth filling with blood. He’s strong, too strong, and he flings her into the dresser— but then he’s whirling about, howling, clutching at his ear as a little wren hangs there, pecking and clawing.

  Miriam has one shot. One. Not to save anybody. But for revenge.

  She stands. Gun up. Pain throbbing in her leg. Breath gone from her.

  Then a wave of something inside her. A feeling. Warm and deep. Pleasure and pain bloom together in a braiding vine of new growth. Her legs buckle. Her mouth goes wet. The gun slides from her grip.

  And all the birds stop too. They settle back on their perches. They start to murmur and squawk, one by one taking flight. Heading back out the window, a few feathers floating in the space where they once were.

  Miriam rolls over on her side. />
  Ofelia comes, stands over her. The girl’s face is all fucked up. Like she tried to make out with a thorn bush: Scratches bleeding. Her lip torn open. A beak wound just under her eye, pumping little jets of fresh blood. She swallows, says, “Feels good, doesn’t it? What can I say? I got a gift.”

  Then she spits on Miriam.

  “Don’t have to do this,” Miriam says, moaning. Trying to push past the good feeling in her belly, the warmth between her legs. “Please.”

  “You found your way out of Hell, little bird. So why’d you come back?”

  Ofelia kicks her in the side.

  The pleasure is gone then: a merciless void.

  She tries to pull herself up, but Ethan backhands her, then rushes to his wife— his bleeding, trembling wife. Sitting there in her chair. One ear almost torn off. Scratches and cuts mark her, as they do Ofelia. Bird waste down her chest.

  “You’re going to pay for this,” Ethan says, his voice trembling. He strokes his wife’s cheek, his fingers coming away red. “But first, I want you to see that we weren’t lying. I want you to see where you failed. Then you’ll get your justice.”

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  WAVE OF MUTILATION

  Hands bound behind her back with zip ties. Kneeling there in the open air of the camp. Tents fluttering around as the last winds of the storm pass by. Sun is up and out now, emerging from a bank of gray, anvil-struck clouds like it’s here to see what’s to come of her. It hates her and always has. The sun will enjoy this.

  The remnants of the Coming Storm have gathered. Many mutilated by birds— birds who are now gone, who have taken many pounds of flesh before Miriam could no longer control them. Ofelia did that to her. Broke her connection— one power against another, hands snapping her antenna.

  Bitch.

  Miriam spits in the wet dust. She’s surprised it isn’t red.

  Doesn’t matter much. Blood pumps out of the hole in her leg. Maybe the bullet hit an artery. Her head dips and sways. She’s woozy. Finding her own thoughts is hard and getting harder: it’s like being drunk, like she has to think her way through the fabric of a heavy sweater.