Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

“I know I wasn’t a good mother to you, Miriam. But maybe I wasn’t all bad, because you turned out okay.”

  “I turned out terrible. I’m a baby in a stroller barreling downhill toward an alligator farm. I’m a rat drowning in the sewer. I’m a nuclear accident at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.”

  “You got a good heart.”

  “I ate a heart.”

  “I saw. So foul. You’re a very strange girl.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You should go. It’s time to go back.”

  Miriam sighs. “Okay.” Then she says, “Is this really the afterlife? Some kind of heaven-hell combo pack? Limbo, Purgatory, some middling, in-between place? Are you really Evelyn? I know you’re not the Trespasser. Tell me the truth. Tell me who you are, what this is.”

  “I’m whatever you need me to be. But no, I’m not that other thing. That other thing, it’s very angry, Miriam. It’s the angriest, most spiteful thing you’ve ever known. And it wants you very badly. It has orchestrated all the world to come for you and that child of yours—but I sense there’s something else, too. Some grander, stranger plan it has. Some tricks up its sleeve that I can’t see.”

  “The other thing. You mean the Trespasser.”

  “Yes, but that’s not what we call it here.”

  “What do you call it here?”

  “The Ghost of All-Dead.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  SHOTGUN GOES BOO-YA

  Her ears ring.

  The air reeks of expended powder: that eggy, infernal stink.

  In the darkness of Lukauskis’s house, Miriam gasps, lurching to consciousness—the pain in her chest alternates between scorching hot and arctic cold, and she claws at her shirt, knowing what she’s about to find: a ragged crater where shotgun pellets rent her chest asunder. A breastbone blasted open like a kicked-in door. Blood and bone. The wind whistling through her exposed heart—and with it, one thought running through her bad brain like a sacred mantra: please heal, please heal, please heal.

  And now, here comes Harriet. Her face, moonlike and pale, looms into view over her. Hands pressing down on her shoulders. Mouth leering, bisecting her face into a crocodilian grin, all teeth, all sharp little teeth—

  “Miriam, are you all right?” Harriet asks.

  Correction: Harriet asks, in Gabby’s voice.

  And then Miriam blinks, and Harriet is gone. The darkness resolves and it’s not Harriet Adams but Gabby, who hovers over her.

  Miriam tries to say I’m not all right, I’ve been shot. But the words come out a squeak-and-whistle. Gabby helps her sit up and she resists, because she knows if she sits up, more blood will pour out of her, and her heart might just fall out of her chest like worms out of a kicked-over bait-bucket. But she doesn’t resist enough and now she’s sitting up. . . .

  Her hands, still searching her chest, find no hole.

  No crater.

  No splintered bone or ruined flesh. No blooming blood flower in which sits her still-beating heart.

  All the skin, all the bone, seems to be where it needs to be.

  It hurts, though, to the touch—tender as a broken jaw. She gasps sharply at her own searching fingers. I healed, she thinks. I healed fast.

  But then Gabby holds something up: a square something-or-other, like a little pillow. “A beanbag,” she says.

  That’s when Miriam gets it: whoever shot her didn’t shoot her with buckshot or birdshot or a slug from a shotgun. It nailed her in the chest with a beanbag—admittedly, a beanbag that punched her chest traveling several hundred feet per second. Which explains the pain.

  “Fuck,” she wheezes, tears in her eyes.

  “A little lower,” Gabby says, “and I don’t know . . .”

  Miriam touches her belly. She doesn’t feel anything . . . broken.

  Gabby helps her stand up. “I saw someone run out of here—a man, big beard, the gun in his hand. He ran out the back.”

  “We can . . . nngh, catch him.”

  “I don’t know, Miriam; it’s been a few minutes already—”

  Outside, the woop-woop of a police siren. Miriam’s pulse throttles. Maybe it’s Guerrero. Maybe it’s just that they heard a weapon discharge.

  Either way, they can’t stick around. “Shit. We have to go.”

  “C’mon, we’ll sneak out the back,” Gabby says. “See if we can’t make it back to the car. You okay to walk?”

  “I’m okay,” Miriam says, but she’s about the furthest fucking thing from okay. If that was their medium, then their one good chance of soliciting his help may have just run out the back door with a shotgun in his hand. He’s either in the wind, or he’ll be in the back of a cop car soon enough. Miriam has overplayed every hand she’s been dealt and re-dealt.

  Despair sings a grim dirge as they flee his house, into the bleak yellow night of the City of Angels.

  FIFTY-NINE

  THE TRAIL OF THE DEAD

  Time passes, as it must. As it wants. For time knows no other desire than to move ineluctably forward, though to Miriam, it is less an act of forward momentum and more a downward one—it winnows and dwindles, like a supply of food that cannot be reclaimed, like money you spend but never get back, like age that piles up while life slips away.

  Time is ticking down on what feels like a countless array of clocks and alarms and hourglasses: Taylor Bowman, killed; Miriam’s daughter born only to die; Gabby, too, dead by her own hand, or rather, likely by the hand of the Trespasser. All this is made worse by the fear that these clocks can be changed: the hour and minute hands wind sooner and sooner, moving their flashpoints of fate far closer, because with the Trespasser involved, and with the intervention of other psychics like David Guerrero, fate is no longer quite so elegantly fixed, is it? She and others like her are fate-changers. They move the needle. They can change the path of the river.

  It occurs to her only after their encounter with the man in Abraham Lukauskis’s house that, if that man were Lukauskis, he could’ve very easily ended her child’s life then and there. Because he, like her, breaks fate. He’s not bound by those chains. He shatters those chains.

  Her baby is destined to die upon birth, but the hand of a psychic could change that. And the Trespasser could change that too. Once upon a time, the Trespasser needed her to change fate. Now it’s learning to do it all its own—though it must still need her for now.

  And perhaps she shouldn’t even be calling it the Trespasser anymore.

  Because her mother, or the spirit of her mother, gave it a new name:

  The Ghost of All-Dead.

  That’s a name she doesn’t understand. She cannot say how to take it: is it literally a ghost? What does All-Dead mean? Most of all . . .

  Does it even matter?

  Whatever the case, they need to find Abraham Lukauskis.

  But they also must remain safe.

  So, they do as time does: they move forward.

  She and Gabby flee the city. They know that Los Angeles is David Guerrero’s domain, and they don’t want to be in it. Bad enough that they’re on the run, but being caught in whatever snares he has waiting for them will do neither of them any favors, so they drive out, into the desert.

  Miriam makes a call to Rita Shermansky, hoping like hell that old bat (and her former, if brief, cohort in crime) can help her get a place to stay, but Rita doesn’t know anybody out on the West Coast who can help her (“not anybody that’s still alive, anyway, doll,” Rita explains), so instead they drive and drive, looking up ads in local free newspapers for some place to stay.

  They end up in a place called Twentynine Palms, about 150 miles due east of Los Angeles. It’s right on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Park, which also puts it on the cusp of the Mojave Desert. They rent a little one-bedroom shithole—painted blue as a robin’s egg—in the middle of some defunct ranchland for two hundred a month. They rent it from an old Paiute named Walter, and the last of their money goes toward the security deposit and a load of meager g
roceries.

  Gabby gets another waitress job. A diner out by the park entrance. They pay her under the table, and the tips from tourists are good.

  Miriam lets the dye in her hair lapse; she wants to color it red, but Gabby is all, blah blah blah, you’ll have to bleach the hell out of it, you’re probably ruining your hair follicles, and that can’t be good for the baby, so instead Miriam just chops it short, forms it into a kind of stiff peaky faux-hawk.

  The days are hot as a blister. The nights are cool, sometimes cold. They can see the sunset from their front door, and it always looks like firelight on a full-body bruise.

  While Gabby works, Miriam works, too.

  She works at trying to find Abraham Lukauskis. Who remains her only chance, she believes, at understanding the greater picture. She’s tried to find other mediums—she called around, and sure enough, like she thought, they’re all fake-ass phonies. It’s charlatans all the way down. And it’s not like there’s some other way to find a real-deal medium; Lukauskis is the first she’s ever heard of, and likely, the last. Psychic powers don’t seem to see a lot of duplication.

  It’s Gabby, though, who has the idea one night as they’re sitting around, staring out over the desert (because they have little else do to): “He had a bunch of weird shit around that house.” Miriam agrees he did, yes, including dead cats and symbol-marked jars of human piss. “But some of it,” Gabby continues, “was like real occult-type stuff. Maybe he shops at those kinds of stores. Might be worth calling around.”

  So, that’s where Miriam starts.

  She doesn’t have the Magical Internet on her phone anymore—because she ditched her phone and bought a cheapy burner from a convenience store—so instead, she heads to a library northwest of them, back toward civilization, in Hesperia. There she accesses the Net and uses it to gather a list of New Age stores, occult shops, Santeria botanicas, and the like. She starts calling them, first calling the ones that were near to Lukauskis’s house.

  On the second call, she already hits paydirt.

  A man, quiet-voiced and serious, says, “Yes, we know Abe. Is he all right?” Which, already, is a red flag. That’s a strange question to lead with.

  Miriam says as much.

  The man explains: “Abe hasn’t been around in a few weeks. Maybe even a couple months. He always seemed . . . troubled.”

  Miriam lies: “I’m a friend, and I was hoping you’d seen him.”

  “No, sorry.”

  “You know where he might’ve gone?”

  A long pause. “You say you’re a friend?”

  “I am. I went to his house in Boyle Heights; I saw signs of a scuffle.” She neglects to mention that she helped cause the scuffle.

  Another long pause. “He’s been known to hang out with some of the witch circles in Henderson, Nevada. He grew up in San Francisco, I think, so maybe he went to be with family—though I don’t think they’re around anymore. Sometimes, he takes trips to Lone Pine; I think he communes with some of the natives up there. Shoshone or such.”

  It’s a start.

  Miriam heads back to the rental in Twentynine Palms.

  On the way, she sees something interesting.

  SIXTY

  THE SIGN OF THE MERMAID

  “It was the fucking mermaid poster,” Miriam says.

  Gabby sits across from her on a ratty pull-out couch—same one they’ve been sleeping on every night, since this dingy little desert box came furnished, just without an actual bed. She plugs away at a Corona as Miriam explains what she saw:

  “I was driving out of Hesperia and I saw a bar.”

  “You didn’t drink,” Gabby says, direly.

  “Says the woman currently drinking—which, to me, is really just a cruel taunt, you know that, right?”

  Gabby makes a sheepish smile over the lip of her bottle. “Sorry?”

  “Ugh. It’s fine. No, I did not have a drink. But . . . this bunghole of a bar had a poster outside, on the wall. Ratty, fraying. But in a frame, almost like you’d see a movie poster displayed at an old movie house. It was the fucking mermaid poster. The one from my vision, where Taylor Bowman gets got by the Starfucker.” The vision replays in her head—

  A hard, open-handed hit wakes Taylor Bowman up. He’s bound to a chair. Still bound. Been bound so long, his hands and feet are numb, so numb they’re less like limbs and more like hunks of dead meat hanging there, bloodless and raw. It’s dark here but he can still see the margins of the room he’s in—a desk, wood paneling, the smell of dry rot and desert sand. He sees an old poster on the wall: got no name on it, though, it just shows a mermaid drawn up like the St. Pauli Girl, drinking a tall seafoam lager. Papers too lay scattered about the room. . . .

  “You think that’s where he dies.”

  “Could be. It’s literally the only lead I have.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Miriam nibbles a thumbnail. “Nothing.”

  “. . . nothing?”

  “Not a thing. It’s not my fucking problem.”

  “No, I know but—maybe you can use the information anyway.”

  “How’s that?”

  Gabby leans in, almost conspiratorially. “It’s currency. Give it to Guerrero. A peace offering. He wanted actionable information, so give him some actionable information. Maybe it gets you back in.”

  Miriam doesn’t think about it for long.

  “No,” she says.

  “Miriam—”

  “I know! I know, but hear me out. It’s a huge risk. I call him, and that just lets Guerrero zero in on where we are, and it gives him a theoretical win. Or the info I give him is wrong and it just pisses him off more.”

  “But it could get you back to Shahini as your doctor.”

  “Yeah. I know.” She bites her thumbnail down to the quick. It starts to bleed, so she pops it into her mouth like a lollipop. “We’ll blow up that bridge when we get to it.”

  “Maybe you’re right, though; maybe Guerrero isn’t trustworthy.”

  “He was keeping things from me.”

  “And he was ready to arrest you at the drop of the hat. He never really made the charges go away.”

  “Fuck that guy. He doesn’t deserve the win.”

  “So,” Gabby says, “what will you do? About Taylor Bowman.”

  “I . . . don’t think anything.”

  That seems to stun Gabby. “You’re just going to let him die?”

  “Gabby, people die. I dunno if you’ve noticed that, but it’s a recurring problem, people dying left and fucking right, almost like none of us are immortal, almost like death is a part of life. It’s not my job to correct that. I’ve been treating it like it’s some kind of mistake, but maybe it’s not my business. I don’t know that I’ve ever made anything better by meddling.”

  “You saved Louis.”

  “But his death would’ve been my fault.”

  “You now have his daughter.”

  “That’s . . . something, but I remind you that she dies too.”

  “You saved me.”

  “Not yet, I haven’t.”

  They sit in silence for a while. Gabby doesn’t have anything more to say, it seems. Maybe she’s realizing that what Miriam said was true. But finally, she seems once again to get her back up, and she leans forward and, while gesturing with the beer bottle, says:

  “No. I don’t believe it. You’ve made lives better. You’ve killed killers, which means there are victims you don’t even know about who get to live because of you. You’ve given closure to people, too. Like that teacher you told me about, the one who had pancreatic cancer—you gave her a chance to live out her life on her terms. Steve, too.”

  “Steve Wiebe. Shit. We should call him.”

  “You think they’d arrest him?”

  Miriam hmms. “I don’t think so. But they might watch him.”

  “We shouldn’t call.”

  “Nope.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuc
k.”

  “So, Bowman just dies?”

  “Bowman just dies.”

  “And Guerrero gets nothing?”

  Miriam nods. “If I had a drink, I’d clink it against yours.”

  “So, we just hunker down, focus our energies on finding Lukauskis.”

  “That is exactly it.”

  Miriam goes to suck her bloodied thumb again—but the blood is dry and the nail is not only healed, it has grown once more over the quick.

  SIXTY-ONE

  REMNANTS

  Halloran Springs, California.

  It’s about forty miles from the Nevada border, on the highway toward Vegas. The highway is littered with homespun grave markers: the signs of those who died, probably half-drunk and mostly broke, on the way back from Las Vegas at four o’clock in the morning.

  The Miata sits marked outside an abandoned gas station, above which towers a skeletal, arrow-shaped sign that says:

  NED’S GAS.

  Underneath in letters of pure rust:

  GIFTS, 24-HR TOWING, EAT.

  Miriam gets out of the car. Her belly is now bulging. They have been out here, in exile from Guerrero and Los Angeles, for over six weeks now. Long enough for the Starfucker to have claimed another young actor—the newspaper identified the victim as Ostin Cole, some up-and-comer producer’s kid. That was a month ago.

  A month ago to the day.

  Today is the 11th.

  Today is when Taylor Bowman dies.

  Miriam knows this as Gabby follows her into the abandoned gas station. She tries not to think about it.

  The gas station seems eerily preserved. Dust-swept, wind-worn. Windows long broken. The chrome on stools and counters has corroded. It’s like the ghost of a gas station, lingering on long after death to haunt the desert highway where it once stood.

  “This is it?” Gabby asks.

  “Yeah.”

  For weeks, they’ve been following up false leads on Abraham Lukauskis, their medium. It’s been one dead end after the other. People knew him. He shopped at their weird stores: he bought crystals and peace pipes and dreamcatchers, he bought saint candles and chicken’s-foot amulets and collections of bird and lizard bones. They heard he might be in Henderson, so they took a drive out there, met a witchy goth chick who told them who his weed dealer was. They heard he was in Lone Pine, so they went to Lone Pine to meet his weed dealer, a dude who called himself Red Boy, but Red Boy hadn’t seen him (information they only learned by buying a considerable bag of weed, which neither of them smoke, so Gabby parceled it out to the other waitresses at the diner, thus earning her the temporary role of “weed dealer”). Then Red Boy called them, told them he’d heard from an old white mystic living down in Halloran Springs that sure enough, Lukauskis was haunting the area. And that he’d set up shop here.