Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  Since they talked that night after Christmas, things have been uncomfortable between them. Not knock-down drag-out throw-chairs-at-each-other uncomfortable, though Miriam would’ve preferred that, honestly. This was a subtler chill. A cold war. Gabby was acting like a cat, all slinking away and offering sideways stares. Miriam needs to escalate this thing, and she decides the way to do that is to tell Gabby the truth.

  Lies are like lockpicks. A deft practitioner can use them to gently open a door and sneak through. Truth opens the door too, but it does so with the force of a rampaging bull. Miriam is gifted at both, but lies require work, and truth demands no such finesse.

  All she needs is her opening.

  That night, Gabby’s on the couch, sipping a Corona, and as she does, the lime in the bottle releases the bubbles it’s collected, fizzing to the top. The houseboat is cramped, but Miriam likes it that way. It’s probably all this preggo-talk, but she can’t help but feel the place is womblike. Lots of warm wood, tons of pillows, everything shoved just that much closer together. You wouldn’t want to run laps around the place, but the whole house feels like a bed, like you could lie down and sleep anywhere. Like it would envelop you, swallow you up, bury you forgotten and deep.

  “You could have one,” Gabby says, after swigging from the bottle. “I read that beer is okay for pregnant women, long as they don’t get drunk.”

  Miriam, sitting on a mustard-yellow recliner that came with the houseboat, has wrapped herself up into a bundle. Knees to her chest, arms around her knees. She knows she won’t be able to make this shape forever, because soon she’ll bulge with the shape of the growing parasite. Presently, she stares out from between the hills formed by her knees.

  “Beer sucks,” Miriam says. “It’s like cat pee. I’d rather drink wine, and that’s telling you something, because wine is really just sadness in a glass. Did you read anything about whiskey? Is whiskey good for a pregnant mom? Tequila? What if I mix orange juice with it, then is it healthy?”

  Gabby gives her a quizzical look, like she’s not sure if Miriam is being serious. (Miriam thinks: I am being serious, give me whiskey, give me whiskey now.) “The book didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Book. What book?”

  “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

  “You bought a book.” Statement, not a question.

  “Yeah. I bought a book.” Her hackles were up. Good. “Why?”

  “You’re not the mom. Or my mom. Or a mom.”

  Gabby sits up straighter, an animal warned suddenly by the scent of a predator. “I know that. So what?”

  “So what? I just mean—”

  “You just mean I’m not involved in all this.”

  “Of course you’re involved. You’re right there. Look. There you are. Here you are. Involved.”

  “But not involved enough to buy a book. You want me to be here to help you but not be a parent to this kid.”

  “Yeah, right, exactly.”

  Gabby sits up all the way, now, and plunks the beer bottle down on the cheap-ass mid-century modern coffee table. It thuds. The Corona fizzes over, but Gabby doesn’t seem to care.

  “Nice,” Gabby says. “Real nice.”

  “Why do you want to be a parent? This isn’t about you. Gabs, I’m just not ready to . . . tag you in on this. It’s not your kid and I don’t want you to be responsible. I don’t even know if it survives. Listen, there’s something I need to tell you—” But Gabby doesn’t hear her, and keeps on with this.

  “I want to be involved. Like you said: I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “Why? Why are you here?”

  “Because I love you, you stupid asshole!”

  “. . . oh.”

  “And I believe the baby will survive. You’ll make it happen. I know you, Miriam.”

  “Like how my mother survived? Or Grosky? Or Louis?”

  “Miriam—”

  “Louis died. I didn’t save him.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry, I just mean—”

  “It’s fine.” She presses her face further into the valley formed by her own knees, cheeks to the bare skin of her legs, cold flesh on cold flesh. Darkness descends on her. Hands trying to pull her down into a bleak, unremitting despair. But she sneaks a peek, and the look on Gabby’s face brings her back. It’s a look of hope, contrary to all the rest of reality. A little glimmer of light in the black of each eye. Finally, the words come up out of Miriam unbidden—her face is smooshed between her knees, though, so the words come out, well, smooshy. “I need you. Okay? I need you to be there with me at the end of this.”

  “What?” Gabby leans in. “Sorry? Could you say that a little louder?”

  Miriam repeats: “I need you to be there—”

  “No, get your face out of your legs. It sounds like you’re talking around a mouthful of mushy peas.”

  Miriam lifts her chin. “I’m going to resist making a sex joke about faces-between-legs because I respect you.”

  “Out with it.”

  “I. Need. You.” Miriam enunciates each word like a fork tapped against a crystal goblet, ting, ting, ting. “I need you to be there with me at the end of this. And I mean that . . . no matter how this ends. With the baby alive or dead. With life being whatever life becomes. I need you.”

  “You got me. And I need you, too.”

  They sit in silence for a while. Gabby leans back and extends her leg out—with her bare foot she traces her wiggly toes up Miriam’s calf. She leans over her bottle, a lascivious look on her face.

  “First armpit stuff,” Miriam says, “and now a foot fetish?”

  “I’m not into feet or armpits.” Her toes tickle up further, to Miriam’s knee. Wiggle, wiggle, tickle, tickle. “But I am into you. We could hit the bunk. We could . . . mess around. What was that about a face between legs?”

  Miriam reaches out and runs her fingers over the top of Gabby’s naked foot—feeling the bones leading to her toes.

  (bones like bird bones)

  “I’m pregnant. You don’t want me. I’m a hideous beast.”

  “You’re not even ten weeks pregnant. The baby weighs an ounce.”

  “See? I’m huge already.”

  “So dramatic. Shut up.” Gabby again sets the beer on the table, right in the lake she formed the last time she put it down. She stands, and steps over, stooping down to press her mouth against Miriam’s. Her lips are soft. Her tongue slides in, an intruder—

  (a trespasser)

  Hands slide around Miriam’s middle. Fingers digging furrows across the flesh of her lower bag, meeting in the middle, pulling her up—

  Miriam’s own fingers find Gabby’s face, cupping it—

  (a lacework of scar tissue)

  (a broken mirror)

  (a medicine cabinet)

  (a suicide)

  Shit shit shit.

  Miriam pulls away, gasping for air, a string of saliva connecting their two lips. The grin on Gabby’s face is a wicked sickle. Her eyes flash with lust. But Miriam grits her teeth, moans, and says:

  “I need to tell you something. Somethings, actually.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  Gabby pulls away, sighing. She sits on the arm of the couch. “You could’ve waited until after we fucked like the last two bunnies on earth.”

  “No, I don’t think I could.”

  “That serious, huh?”

  “That serious.”

  “Lay it on me.”

  “All of it?”

  Gabby makes a bring it on gesture. “All of it.”

  “I . . . am pretty sure I know how I’m pregnant. Pregnant when I’m not supposed to be.”

  “Okaaaaay.”

  “I . . . so, when I killed Harriet Adams, I may have taken some of her power. When I hurt her, she healed it, and now I . . .” She wrinkles up her brow, deciding that right now was not the best time to explain how she had to eat the other woman’s heart. “I think I have that power too.” />
  “The wound. Under your arm. Of course.”

  “Yeah.” Miriam pulls back the sleeve of her tee, shows off her bicep. There, across it, is the ghost of an injury. “See this scar?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I cut myself there last night. Fresh fucking cut, red blood, and now, it’s this.”

  Gabby leans down, staring at it, fascinated. “It looks like a scar from . . . years ago. Childhood, maybe.” She pokes at it. Miriam pulls away, not because it hurts, but because it tickles, and tickling sucks and nobody should tickle anybody ever, the end. “Sorry.”

  “So, I think . . . with Harriet’s power, maybe it healed something inside of me. It let the pregnancy happen instead of miscarrying. I mean—assuming I don’t still miscarry, but my vision says differently.”

  “Jesus, Mir. That’s—that’s good, right? A weird kind of miracle.”

  “If you say so. I’m still pregnant.” Miriam hesitates. “And there’s more.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  Miriam shakes her head. “No. Which is why I have to tell you. You know the Trespasser? The . . . thing I see? The presence, the entity, the demon, whatever-the-fuck-it-is. It’s gotten worse. More powerful. When I stole the ambulance and ran from the cops, the paramedic driving the ambulance killed the cop and then himself.”

  “Jesus. Miriam, you never told me that.”

  Miriam still tastes the Corona on her lips and tongue from Gabby’s kiss. It’s a nice moment that breaks through the horrible memory, which only makes the whole story feel stranger as she tells is. “Thing is, he wasn’t himself. He was . . . possessed. By the Trespasser, and I know because the Trespasser taunts me in its very special way. That demon is its own unique brand of motherfucker, and . . . I just know it was him. It. Whatever. And it’s angry. Angry that I’m pregnant. Angry that maybe I have a way out, an escape.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Gabby says, obviously not sure where this is going.

  Deep breath, Miriam. Let it all out.

  “The other day, at the doc’s, I . . . the doctor reached out and touched my arm as we were leaving. And I saw how he dies.”

  “Is it bad?”

  “It’s bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “You kill him.”

  Gabby snorts a laugh, but then furrows her brow when Miriam keeps a straight face. “Wait, you’re not kidding. Why the hell would I kill him?”

  “You . . . wouldn’t. Especially like this. You carve into him with a scalpel, stabbing him. Torturing him. It’s fucked up. But the thing is, it’s not you doing it. It’s the demon. It’s the Trespasser.”

  “I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “It possesses you.”

  She watches the realization cross Gabby’s face—like a shadow darkening a bright day. “Like the ambulance driver. And the police officer. Oh, god.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Gabby says, morose.

  “I think I know how you die. You were right. You won’t go into your house and eat a fistful of pills. Not on your own.”

  The look on Gabby’s face says she gets it. “But if I were possessed . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  Tears shine in Gabby’s eyes. “I don’t want to be possessed. I . . . I don’t even think—maybe you’re wrong, maybe this isn’t real—”

  “It’s real. And I’m right. I know it.”

  “God. Fuck.” The tears let loose, now—one by one, they roll down the topography that forms the map of Gabby’s scar tissue. “Fuck.”

  “That’s all the bad news.”

  “There can’t possibly be good news.”

  “I think there is. Because if the Trespasser is the thing that kills you—if it possesses you and drives you to that point? Then I can stop it.” She feels her heart hammering the inside of her chest like a punching fist. “I can keep you alive. All I have to do is kill it first.”

  “Kill the Trespasser?”

  She nods. “Kill the motherfucking Trespasser.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  BUNNIES THUMPING

  They fuck like the last two bunnies on Earth.

  And that is a very specific kind of coitus.

  It’s the kind of fucking that says, We may be the last ones here, the rest of our kind may be gone, and we may be gone soon, too. No promises. No guarantees. But it also says, It’s in us. The potential. The chance to be alive and to make more of us. It’s a desperate, insane kind of fucking—desperate and insane because despite what’s come, and despite what’s likely on the way, it thrives on a pulsating nucleus of hope, a pounding core of possibility. It’s two people coiled and writhing around the axis of a single, defiant middle finger, defiant of everything that has gone wrong and may yet go awry, spiteful of what-yet-may-come.

  This fucking is angry. It’s vengeful. Not against each other, no—this anger is shared. The vengeance is a uniting element, not an agitating one, not one that separates them. It’s skin slapping skin, it’s teeth tugging on a lower lip, it’s hands digging into the flesh of an ass-cheek in order to pull one another against each other, into each other, as if with enough heat and struggle, two could handily become one. Two phoenixes, rising together and fornicating in the consumptive conflagration of flame.

  This fucking is like a song that goes slow, that goes quiet, and then that rises back up again like a spiraling resurrection of guitars and drums and cymbal crashes and cannons booming and buildings collapsing.

  This fucking is intense. It’s noise. It’s sweat. It’s mouths open and trailing saliva across open tracts of skin. The rain is a drumbeat, a heartbeat. The ocean is movement. They each come like a gun going off. The boom, the recoil, the quiet after but for the ears ringing.

  They lay there for a while, each tangled in the serpent’s embrace of arms, legs, sheets. Gabby is the one who breaks the silence.

  She says, “We can do this.”

  “We can do this.”

  “But tell me, you have a plan, right?”

  “I have a plan,” Miriam says, still panting, still tasting Gabby on her tongue. She wipes a curl of damp hair from her face.

  “What is the plan?”

  “In the morning, I make a phone call. That’s the plan.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  COCKTAIL WEENIES AND SEAFOOD BOULDERS

  Miriam’s on the back patio of the Key Largo Conch House, leaning back as the waitress brings a plate of little deep-fried seafood boulders: conch fritters. It’s her second plate. “I’m eating for two,” she told the waitress—a forty-year-old woman who dies nine years from now after drunk-drowning in her own damn swimming pool.

  The waitress drops the plate and asks if Miriam wants anything else, and she does: “Extra dipping sauce, please. This stuff is like liquid heroin. After today, I’m going to need to go to a meeting.”

  “Okay, hon,” the waitress says, so obviously used to dealing with local randos that nothing could faze her. Her attitude is bulletproof. Miriam could kick off her shoes and eat the fritters with her monkeytoes and the waitress would just say okay, hon, like nothing about it was weird at all.

  As the waitress recedes, the tide brings a new visitor:

  FBI’s own David Guerrero.

  He’s not in a suit, thankfully. He’s got a short-sleeve button-down, tight on his muscular frame. A pair of khaki cargo shorts hangs beneath them. Sunglasses so dark, they might as well be black holes covering his eyes.

  From under the table, Miriam kicks with her foot, pushing out the chair opposite her. “Sit,” she says as she dips a fritter in the orange sauce and pops the whole thing in her mouth. “Thanksh for coming.” Chew, chew.

  “Florida, huh?” he says, taking a seat. “You keep coming back here.”

  She narrows her eyes. “That’s right. You’ve been following me.”

  “Following your progress. Your . . . life, such as it is.”

  Cheek bulging with fritter, she spreads her arms wide. “And oh, wh
at a life it is, Agent Guerrero. Magic and adventure every day. My existence is basically Disney World. I’m a Disney princess, tra-la-la, getting up every morning with songbirds helping me put on my clothes.” And suddenly she realizes out loud: “Wait, I could actually do that. This changes everything.” But then, a second, more disappointing epiphany: “Nah, you know what, birds crap on everything. Maybe they could help me get a T-shirt over my head, but they would shit in my hair.”

  “You seem awfully animated today.”

  “Animated. Good joke.” Another fritter in her mouth, pop. She grins, with fritter smeared across the flats of her teeth. “Anyway. Get to know me and you’ll soon realize: I’m just getting started, Guerrero.”

  “Conch fritters?” he asks.

  “You bet. Want one?”

  “Sure.” With careful movement, he plucks one between thumb and forefinger and brings it over to him, bypassing the sauce. Gently he pulls it apart. Steam rises from the spongy fritter like little sea snail ghosts.

  “The conch are tough, like little seafoody pencil erasers, and yet they’re amazing? They almost make Florida worth it.” She shrugs. “At least it’s not brain-boilingly hot today.” The view from the back patio is nice too: almost tropical. Shaded by an erratic ring of palm trees that look like they’ve gathered here as a cabal of friendly drunks, swoop-backed and bent over, leaning on one another for support and camaraderie.

  Guerrero eats. Not in big gulps like her, but gently, slowly, methodically. A pull from a fritter goes into his mouth, and he chews, stiff-jawed, nodding as he does. “So,” he says, finally done and pinch-wiping his fingers on the napkin there. “Why am I here?”

  “In your pretty pink shirt?”

  “Is there a problem with a man wearing pink?”

  She thrusts up a finger. “To the contrary, my good man. A pink shirt is usually a sign of a big—or at least comfortably sized—dick. Not that the size of a dick is particularly significant—I’m no Size Queen—but a lotta guys certainly think it matters, and the ones who are self-conscious about their itty-bitty dinkle-doos are also the same ones who wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a pink shirt because, I dunno, pink is the color of Strawberry Shortcake’s vagina or some happy horseshit like that.”