Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Folks watch her. Many still bleeding. Pressing rags to injuries. Over there: a big-boned hound dog of a woman has a handkerchief pressed over a ruined eye. A skinny weasel dude next to her is trying to staunch the blood pouring from a gash in his head. He’s doing a piss-poor job of it and has to keep blinking it away. People limp up. Shift nervously from foot to foot. Feathers blow on the wind.

  The crowd parts. Ethan steps up. Ofelia comes behind him, wheeling Karen. Ethan holds out his hand, then snaps his fingers like he’s summoning a dog. And Miriam’s heart, or what passes for it, shrinks like a grape gone raisin.

  Isaiah hurries to catch up. He takes Ethan’s hand.

  For a time, they just stand there, staring.

  Isaiah says, “I’m sorry.”

  Miriam nods. “I know, kid.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ethan says. “We’re gonna be good to him. Give the kid whatever he wants. Popsicles. A PlayStation. A helicopter ride through the Grand Canyon. He knows we’re family. He’s got a soft spot for you, but one day he’ll see you for the monster that you are.” He sniffs. “Anyway. Here.”

  He pulls out an emergency radio, the kind you wind up, the kind without batteries. He fiddles with the tuner and it goes through a babble of music and words and static before settling on a news station:

  “— are calling an act of domestic terror but others are hoping remains an isolated incident. The incident today at the Pima County courthouse is reminiscent of the Oklahoma City bombing, where Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols carried out an attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in a perceived retaliation for what happened at Waco and Ruby Ridge—”

  It goes on like that for a while. Nobody’s tallied the deaths yet, but they’re speculating over a hundred dead, with maybe three times that in nonfatal injuries. But they’re still pulling folks out of the rubble. They describe the wreckage on the scene. Someone mentions gunmen. An expert comes on, talking about where the bombs were placed—“Looks like they may have been placed in a duct that traveled down the southwest corner—”

  No, goddamnit, fuck, fuck, fuck—

  She didn’t do it. She didn’t stop anything.

  Ethan grabs the radio, turns it off.

  “You’ve done us a grave disservice,” Ethan says to her. “You hurt us. But we persevered. And now it’s time.” He pulls a black pistol from the small of his back. “Say good-bye to the boy. He seems fond of you.”

  The boy steps closer.

  Miriam looks to Isaiah. “Isaiah. Where’d Gabby go? She was supposed to be watching you. Is she okay?”

  He nods and says, “A nice man brought me here.”

  “But where is she? Why did she leave you?”

  “It was a nice man with one eye.”

  And then Isaiah pulls back and reaches for Ethan’s hand.

  Ethan points the gun.

  And stiffens up. His arm out. Tendons going taut on his neck. Eyes starting to bulge. Miriam thinks: This is not where he dies, not how he dies, but then she realizes: Isaiah is like her, he has powers, he can change things, and—

  Ethan’s head snaps back. The veins in his body rise like snakes swimming close to the surface of swamp water: the whites of his eyes go suddenly red. Blood jets from his nose and now Ofelia screams, she’s pulling Karen away—

  Then comes a growl and a roar, the sound of a beast awakening. The hiss and squeal of some demon. The ground shudders beneath her knees and she thinks, This is it; this is Hell opening up beneath me, and she wonders if there are bombs going off and if this is when she really dies or maybe she’s already dead out there in the desert, face down, all this a hallucination born of the rip-and-tug of vulture beaks prying her brains from her broken skull.

  People scream and run. Ethan’s face is a mask of blood. His eyes stare out, dead as train-smashed pennies, and then he collapses.

  Isaiah says, “Now you know what I can do. I’m sorry.”

  He breaks into tears and holds her. Miriam cries too. Then she falls out of his grip and over into her own blood.

  It’s then she sees what’s coming. It’s not a beast, not a demon. It isn’t Hell itself and it’s not bombs going off. It’s a truck. Black. Military. Shining from the rain. It barrels forward, a bank of lights on top of it shining bright— men in black fatigues storm out, guns up, and at first she thinks, Who are they? But then she knows who they are: the Shadow Wolves. Nez, Octavio, and the others. Guns chatter and bark. Lots of yelling. Miriam does all she can do, which is press her forehead to the ground and scream into the earth.

  Someone kneels by her and, with big hands, helps her up. Her bleary eyes see the Trespasser looking down at her— the ghost, the hallucination, the vision summoned from inside her own haunted head.

  “Miriam, come on, we have to go.”

  That voice. That’s not him. That’s not the Trespasser.

  A nice man with one eye.

  It’s Louis.

  PART SEVEN

  * * *

  STORMSWEPT

  INTERLUDE

  THE DEVIL’S BEACH

  Evelyn Black sits on a blue beach chair, smoking a long Virginia Slim. “Want one?” she asks, offering the mint-green pack with her free hand.

  Miriam sits on a beach chair, hers red.

  “I don’t,” she says. To her surprise.

  “Eh,” her mother answers, then puts the pack away and keeps puffing. The water washes in. The water washes out. The sun is filtered behind gray clouds.

  Her mother’s all beached up. A Jimmy Buffett Parrothead shirt. Flip-flops. Bare legs showing varicose veins. A few liver spots on her hands. She smells strongly of coconut tanning oil.

  “Are you her?” Miriam asks. “Or are you him. Or it. Or whatever the fizzy fuck the Trespasser is.”

  “Language,” her mother says.

  Huh. Maybe it is her.

  Evelyn Black just shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m here, though, and you’re here. Sun’s out. I’ve got cigarettes.” She hums a few bars of “Margaritaville.” Which shows Miriam exactly where they are.

  “I’m in Hell,” she says. “This is it. My final punishment. Me and the maybe-ghost of my mother. She’s smoking. I’m not. And I have to listen to her rendition of a Jimmy Buffett song. Satan’s favorite song, if I’m not mistaken.” She rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.

  “This isn’t Hell. You’re not dead. I’m not dead either.”

  “Uh-huh. You’re pretty much dead. In my world.”

  “Well,” her mother says after a long drag. “This isn’t your world.” Then: a long exhale of smoke. Whoosh. Miriam smells it. Mysteriously, it just makes her feel queasy. No nic-fit lurks within like a nest of chewing termites.

  Maybe Hell’s not so bad.

  She leans back on the chair. It creaks. A breeze blows. Salt air.

  “So, what now?” Evelyn asks.

  “I dunno. We sit. Maybe I go for a swim. See how far out I can go before I drown. What happens when a dead person drowns? Hm.”

  “You’re not dead.”

  “Sure. And liquor’s not delicious.”

  “You aren’t dead. You’re not really alive, though, either. But you will be again, soon. So. Same question: what now?”

  “Ugh. Fine. I’ll play. I don’t know what now. I go on being me. I go on doing what I do. Not because I want to but because, like you are oh so fond of saying, it is what it is. Life sucks, so fuck a duck in a bucket.”

  Evelyn stabs out the cigarette in a little ’70s-era ashtray sitting in the sand by her chair. “That’s your plan? Do the same thing you’ve always done? Keep on— what? Stepping in it? Getting other people’s crap on your sandals? Saving people who don’t deserve saving from certain doom? Poor Penelope, tied to the train tracks? Miriam. Miriam. Think about yourself.”

  “That’s all I do. I’m a very selfish person.”

  “You think that. But maybe you think wrong. Maybe you don’t think enough about yourself.” Evelyn turns and lowers h
er sunglasses. “Maybe you can still change yourself. Maybe there’s still a way out.”

  “You know? Whatever. There’s isn’t. Fuck off.”

  “You could be nicer to me. You almost got me killed on that boat.”

  “I basically did get you killed. So, yeah.” A regretful sigh. “I could be nicer to you; you’re right. Sorry. It’s just—” She leans on the arm of the chair, facing her mother. “The woman who may have known how I got clear of this curse of mine, she’s gone. Blew herself up in a bombing I was powerless to stop.”

  Mary, dead.

  And why?

  Miriam knows why. The woman hated herself. Just as Miriam has, at times, hated herself. Just as Miriam once planned to end her own life when the pages of her diary ran out— a suicide scheme interrupted by a killer named Harriet.

  She squeezes her eyes shut. “So, what I want? It’s now impossible.”

  “Like the impossible ever stopped you before.”

  Miriam shrugs. “Point.” Then it strikes her: “You’re not him. It. The Trespasser. Are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the Trespasser wants the opposite of what you’re saying. At least— I think. The Trespasser is a part of my curse. He doesn’t want to be gone from my head. He wants to stay around. Wants me to keep on keeping on.”

  “Well, that Trespasser sounds like a”— Evelyn leans even closer and lowers her voice, enunciating each syllable—“ a real ass-hole.”

  Miriam laughs. “True story.”

  “Anyway. I’m just saying, Miriam. Do what you gotta do. For you, not for them. You did your time. I love you. Time to love yourself.”

  “My time isn’t—”

  Up, she’s about to say, but Evelyn is gone. All that’s left is the water, washing up higher and higher, sucking sand back out to sea. Way out there, past the clouds, past the sun: thunder rumbles and lightning tastes the horizon.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  A NICE, ONE-EYED MAN

  Beep-beep-beep— light rushes in. Sound. Air. The world a pair of clapping hands, her in the middle. Upright. Hands gripping sheets. Long, keening gasp.

  And there he is. Louis. Grabbing one of her hands in both of his own. He’s clean-shaven, like he was back there in the compound. He’s got both eyes there, which doesn’t make sense, doesn’t work at all, and then she realizes: this is still a dream, still a vision, but that eye doesn’t look quite right and she thinks:

  It’s a fake. He’s got a fake eye. Took him long enough.

  She lurches up, throws her arms around him.

  And she kisses him. An ugly kiss— face smashing against his, teeth against teeth, a kiss without propriety, a kiss without care, and she knows she should care about the corpse breath she probably has, and how her lips are as dry as a rough-hewn two-by-four, and how he’s got a fiancée named Samantha, but for now, it’s a kiss with gravity, straight-up, no-fooling physics.

  Someone clears his throat.

  She opens her eyes.

  There are others in the room. Two doctors. Gabby. Isaiah. Isaiah’s smiling a big smile. Gabby is too, but her smile looks sad: mournful in its way.

  Miriam pulls away. Louis does too.

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Oh,” she answers.

  A doctor steps in. Little guy, big forehead. Tufts of white hair sticking off the sides of his head like ruffled ostrich feathers. He adjusts his glasses and says, “Welcome back to the land of the living, Miss Black.”

  She gulps. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  A nurse scoots around, hands her a cup of water. She sips it noisily.

  Everyone stares. The doctor says, “Let’s have a conversation.” To the rest of the room: “May we have some privacy?”

  They all filter out. Louis gives her one last squeeze. Gabby gives a small wave, the sadness there plain to see.

  “I don’t . . .” she starts to say. But her voice is scratchy and raw.

  “I’m Doctor Flaherty. You’re in Tucson, at the University Medical Center. You’ve been in a medically induced coma for three weeks.”

  She blinks. “Oh.”

  Flaherty pulls up a chair. He sits and leans in like they’re girlfriends or something. “The reason we did that is because your brain has been injured. And, far as I can tell, reinjured. You may have had a series of concussions in the past, by the look of it, and all of that resulted in a TBI, a traumatic brain injury. So, to keep your brain safe— while we also worked on that gunshot wound to your leg, and the one in your chest— we induced a coma with propofol.” He laughs, like this is hilarious. And shit, maybe it is. “You’re one broken cookie!”

  She shrugs. “Yeah. I know.”

  His face falls. The humor leaves. “I don’t know what happened to you out there. But a bullet wound stitched up with . . .” He frowns, as if this is distasteful. “Organic matter. Leaves. Grass. We found a . . . feather inside you.” He makes a small sound (“ ah”) and reaches in his white coat. He shows her a large glass vial. A black feather is the only thing inside of it. He shakes it.

  “A souvenir, for me? You shouldn’t have.”

  “Well, everyone else got a T-shirt. From now on, Miss Black, you’re going to have to be more careful. Particularly with this.” He gently pokes his finger into the center of her forehead. Her eyes go crossed watching it. “Your brain won’t handle being rattled around in there anymore. Your skull isn’t a dice cup.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Mm. Still. Keep it protected. Maybe wear a helmet.”

  Hah. Yeah.

  “You’ve got visitors, but you need rest.”

  “I want to see them.”

  “Not now. Later. Tomorrow, maybe.”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Pushy patient. Did I save your life?” Before she can answer, he says, “I did, at that. So, trust me when I say: you need to rest. Have a little water. Eat a little generic hospital Jell-O. If you need anything, press the button.”

  She presses the button.

  A nurse pokes her head in.

  “Just testing,” Miriam says.

  Flaherty frowns.

  FIFTY-NINE

  FEEDING TIME AT THE RAPTOR PADDOCK

  She eats like a woman possessed. After three days, she hasn’t had a proper meal, not really, because what they bring on those plastic turd-brown trays isn’t enough to feed a fat sparrow. But now, now they’re letting her off the leash, and now she’s down in the cafeteria. Which, to her surprise, is a buffet. The plate before her is mounded with breakfast items. All of it terrible.

  Miriam doesn’t care. If she could shovel these watery eggs and papery bacon pieces and gummy potatoes into her mouth with an actual shovel, she would, but right now, she’s forced to use her fork and spoon in tandem.

  “You still eat like the Miriam I remember,” Louis says, sitting across from her. He’s just sipping a cup of coffee.

  “Want some?” she says, cheeks bulging like a hamster who ate a whole saltine cracker. She slides the plate toward him.

  He chuckles. “I think I might lose a finger if I went in for it.”

  “Your loss.” She pulls back. “Actually, not your loss, because basically, this food is awful. But it’s the best awful food. I don’t care. I have no fucks to give. Just . . .” More food. “Hungry.”

  He watches her the way someone watches a shark eat a goat. Eventually, the plate is clean.

  “Now,” she says, breathing in through her nose as she wipes her mouth. “Hi! How are you?”

  “Just dandy, I guess.”

  Way he says it, she knows it’s not true. Wraiths flit across his face: specters of what happened back at the compound. She knows he probably doesn’t want to have the conversation. He’s guarded against it— that much is clear. Miriam can’t care about that. She has to know.

  “I don’t get it,” she says, wincing as she leans forward. “You. There. At the compound. Saving my ass. It doesn’t add up.”

&
nbsp; A flash as the ghosts behind his eyes stir. “Your friend. Gabby?” Way he says it, she wonders if he knows that they had a thing. “She went a long while without hearing from you. Didn’t know who to talk to or how to find you. She reached out to me. Said she took my number from your phone a while back.”

  “Sneaky.”

  “And life-saving, as it turns out. For all of us. I went down to see her in Virginia, at her sister’s, and while me and Samantha were gone, neighbors said someone broke into our apartment. Messed it up pretty good. Seemed like something bad was happening. So, I wanted to go find you. Kick down the doors of that compound— I even thought, maybe I’ll drive my truck straight through the gates. Battering ram, boom. But the boy had another idea.”

  “The boy. Isaiah.”

  “Uh-huh. It was his plan for me to bring him there. He said he wanted to go and could handle himself. I didn’t know how, exactly.” Louis clears his throat. None of this makes him comfortable. All the events of Miriam’s life are barbs of rose thorn: run your hand over them and they cut you up. “I made sure they couldn’t recognize me too easily. Shaved. Cut my hair shorter. I even went and got a fake eyeball.”

  “No more sexy eye patch.” She makes a pouty face.

  “Seems my pirate days are over, matey. Anyway. We went there, and I had no idea what had gone down or what was coming. Gabby had told me some of it, but she didn’t know everything either— and this is your friendly reminder to start writing all this stuff down and telling everybody everything. No more secrets from you.”

  She shrugs.

  “At the same time they were blowing king hell out of that courthouse and killing all those people, me and the kid were trying to get a sign of you at the compound. Then you showed up. You and your friends.”

  Like he can’t bring himself to say it. Those birds.

  “Thanks,” she says. “For coming.”

  “I’ll always be there if you really need it.”

  “No,” she says. “You won’t. And you shouldn’t. You’re with Samantha, right?” He nods. “Stay with her. Get married. Have a litter of puppies. Go fuck off to somewhere tropical for a while and be happy.”