Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  INTERLUDE

  THE FUCK THESE PEOPLE ARE

  Yes, I suppose this is all strange to you.

  It shouldn’t be, perhaps. We’ve whispered past each other now and again, our threads running parallel, if never quite . . . tangling together.

  Alejandro and I belong to a small, intimate organization. The Organization. Our formal name is the Chelicerae, but generally, that name goes unused—the Organization is name enough for us.

  We are . . . or represent . . . a legacy. The Parcae. The Moirai. The Fates. Nona, Decima, Morta. Or in the Greek: Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos. More to the point, we are the children of the latter: Atropos. Clotho spins the thread, Lachesis measures it, and Atropos—

  (here he makes a scissor-snip with his fingers)

  —cuts it.

  Everyone, every human alive, dead, and not yet born, gets a thread. And that thread is woven neatly into a tapestry. Individually, each thread is . . . chaos. It’s just a line of color and shape and texture. When you look closely, that thread intertwines with and is tied to other threads, and they form lines and knots that only seem to . . . create more chaos. Colors clashing, knots snarling in the skein. But if you pull back . . .

  Back, back, back, farther and farther, an interesting thing happens.

  An image starts to emerge.

  A pattern. From the chaos of individuals, the order of the pattern is made. The tapestry is seen to be a thing of design.

  It is as all should be.

  But then there are aberrations.

  Then there’s you.

  Not you specifically. But those with power. The untethered, we say, sometimes, but what we mean are those, like you, who are afforded the gift of seeing the pattern that so few others can see—but are also cursed with the ability to change the pattern. And you do so wantonly, without regard for the shape of things, without a sense of how it all comes together. You’re a fool in the kitchen, fire in the forest, someone throwing paint on a masterpiece just because they like the sound of the paint hitting the canvas.

  You are ruinous.

  And you help to destroy the pattern. We believe that if you keep destroying and disrupting the pattern, then it will not only fray . . . but it will fall apart completely. Life, death, the universe . . .

  All in tatters.

  Scraps on the floor.

  Like you: you save people whose deaths have been ordained. Fate has chosen them to die: their threads end. To fix this, you cut another thread that was expected to go on—but one thread does not replace another. The pattern was sound. Until you, and others, ruin it.

  So, we find your kind.

  And we stop you from ruining the pattern.

  Your thread must end.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  HYPOCRISY

  For a time, she just stares at them. Her face wears a mask of utter incredulity—a face that bears not fear so much as the face of someone completely, unabashedly, unreservedly fed up with their bullshit.

  They seem to find this uncomfortable. They look to one another.

  Miriam finally asks, “You’re not the Starfucker; that was just . . . like you said, bait. Really, you’re cartel.” That, she says to Alejandro.

  “That is correct.”

  “Like, Colombian drug cartel?”

  “The one and only.”

  “And you,” she says to the man named Emerson. “All this that you have, the vineyard, your playspace, it isn’t aboveboard, is it? You’re a criminal.”

  “All wealthy men are criminals.”

  She snarls, “You’re ducking. You’re not Silicon Valley. You’re the fucking Underworld. I can smell it on you, sure as I can smell my own piss.”

  The man, Emerson, pulls the gun closer, pressing the flat of it against his middle. A threat, she thinks. But he concedes: “Yes, I operate in that space.”

  “I operate in that space,” she says, mocking him. She snorts a laugh. “You pretentious fuckos. Here, let me give you my read of that twat-waffle you just gave me: you and the rest of your so-called Organization are a bunch of buttfuck buddies in crime. You all go out. You do crime. But, oh, heavens forfend you just go out and, like, do bad shit without reservation. No, you’ve gotta create this wild mythology around it. This story that somehow you’re serving a larger pattern when in reality, all you’re doing is the act of common evil. You pretend like you have some grand purpose, some higher mind, blah blah blah Nona, Decima, Morta, Clotho, Lachesis, Atroposuck my dick. But all you are is common.”

  Emerson purses his lips. The gun twitches in his hand.

  To Alejandro, he says, “Cut her open.”

  The cartel assassin drops his mask and flashes his hooked skinner knife. He takes a step toward her, and panic throttles through her body like she’s sitting on an electric chair and someone just flipped the switch. He gets between her legs, knife out—he rips the shirt over the swell of her belly. The blade flashes—

  She screams.

  She screams out loud and in her own head: Think of something, think of something, they’re going to take your daughter and dash her against the wall, they’ll cut her to pieces, think of something—

  The blade is cold against her skin—

  In that moment, she sees Alejandro, leaning forward, a viciousness upon his face as the blade begins its cut, and she knows it’ll happen fast, because she’s seen the death of Taylor Bowman and saw how quickly his bowels were piled into his lap—

  She sees the man named Emerson, arms folded limply together, the fingers dangling next to each elbow like fringe of an ugly jacket. He has a cold, clinical stare as he watches all this unfold—

  And then she sees a third member of the audience.

  Just behind Emerson stands a tall, broad shadow. Not-Louis. His one grotesquely painted golf-ball eye is rotated the wrong direction, but the one good eye is fixated pointedly at her, and he wears a strange, mad smile—it’s not a Louis smile, not at all, it’s broad and deranged, a curl to the lips that brings to his face a Joker’s flair—

  That’s it.

  She hurriedly screams, “Wait, wait, wait, I have—I have an offer.”

  The knife stops.

  She feels blood trickling down the side of her stomach.

  Alejandro looks to Emerson and Emerson looks to Alejandro. The older man makes a face that says he’s considering it. Then holds up his hand.

  Alejandro takes a step away. She sees her blood drip from the blade.

  “Offer?” Emerson asks. “I can’t imagine what it is, but I’ll hear it.”

  So, she tells them.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  MIRIAM’S VERY KIND OFFER

  “I’ll give you the demon,” she says, breathlessly. The pain in her stomach throbs with every beat of her heart. She can see that he didn’t cut deep—he didn’t get below her muscle layer, not yet. Just the same, she can see the ridge of skin opening up like a steam-peeled envelope.

  Neither seems to understand her offer.

  “Demon?” Emerson asks.

  Not-Louis regards her with some curiosity now.

  “This power I have,” she says, gulping air, trying to calm down, “is not a power I want. I’m trying to get rid of it. And I know how. When I was sixteen, I was pregnant—the mother of the boy who knocked me up, she . . . she came at me, attacked me in a bathroom. I had internal bleeding. Lost the baby. And when I did, something slipped in. A demon. A ghost.”

  Not-Louis gets it now. His face tightens with growing rage.

  “Shut up, Miriam,” Not-Louis hisses at her, though only she can hear.

  “This thing, it’s called the Ghost of All-Dead. I don’t know what that means. But I know that if I have this baby, I break the curse. But before that happens, I can bring the demon to you.”

  “You fucking scab,” Not-Louis roars.

  “How exactly will you manage this?” Emerson asks her.

  “Emerson,” Alejandro begins, “surely you’re not—”

  “Shh. Step back, Al
ejandro. I am curious.”

  “I know a medium,” she explains. It’s a lie, somewhat. She knows of a medium, and presently she is hoping like hell that Gabby managed to find him and secure his help, or that means she’s even further out on the edge of this cliff than she knows. “He’s going to help me.”

  At this, Not-Louis storms over to her, curling himself around Alejandro like a snake around a tree. The entity’s flesh stretches and distorts. His jaw cracks open, and his throat bulges like a hammerstruck thumb—something moves up through his chest, his throat, like a blob of water pushing through a garden hose, and then it comes out of a mouth that is open wide, too wide—locusts pour out, wings stuttering like playing cards in the spokes of a child’s bike, a thousand children, a thousand bikes, fddddt, and they rush past her in a flensing swarm—

  She winces.

  They’re gone.

  Because they were never here.

  The Trespasser—the Ghost of All-Dead—is gone too.

  Alejandro hovers. He is eager. His knife is hungry.

  “Release her,” Emerson says. “Let’s bring her upstairs, get a bandage on that wound. Though,” he says, throwing a passing glance to her arm, where a bullet once dug its way through the meat of her bicep, “perhaps she won’t require the bandage for long.”

  “Emerson, you old fuck,” Alejandro snarls. “This is a mistake.”

  “Perhaps. But as I grow older, I find mistakes interesting. All that we do, all that we are, is a mistake. We must see them and make them in order to learn from them, so let us learn from this one. No more arguments, Alejandro. You’ve already gone and killed two of my field hands. Your judgment in this is no longer trustworthy.”

  Alejandro turns toward her, his eyes flashing.

  He’s going to kill me anyway, she realizes.

  But he advances with the blade only to cut her hands and legs free. As she falls off the bed, her legs and arms gone totally numb, she collapses against the mat. She tries not to cry as the slow river of blood reluctantly fills her limbs once more.

  SIXTY-SIX

  ROSES ARE RED, VIOLENCE IS BLUE

  Once again, Miriam finds herself upstairs in this house, sitting on a stool at a kitchen counter. They have given her a bandage, which she has applied to the knife slash in her side—already the bandage has filled up with blood and started to soak through, but already too she can feel the itch of the injury mending with the supernatural stitch of her newfound power.

  It’s evening. The moon shines big and bright, beating the sun back behind the horizon. The sky purple as a crushed toe.

  In front of her sits a cup of steaming tea.

  “Thank you for the tea,” she says, coldly.

  “It’s not tea,” Emerson says, “it’s a dandelion tisane.”

  “It’s fucking tea,” Alejandro says. He stands where Miriam once stood, by the large window looking out over the driveway. Except he doesn’t stare out the glass. He stares at her. He has a pistol in his hand—not the same pistol as Emerson held on her before. This one is longer, with a vented barrel at the top. Big barrel. High-caliber. Slick-shit hand-cannon.

  “Tea,” Emerson says, with no small condescension, “is specifically from the plant Camellia sinensis. Only tea is tea. What people call an ‘herbal tea’ is a decoction from a plant that is not Camellia sinensis—chamomile, for instance, or hibiscus, or licorice root—”

  Miriam says, “You said decoction.”

  They both look at her.

  “Isn’t that what you do when you castrate somebody?” she asks. “De-cock-tion? Right? No? Just me? Okay.”

  Alejandro gently eases the barrel to point toward her. “Are you threatening us?”

  “The point is,” Emerson says, talking over them. “We must define our terms and use them correctly. Wine, for instance, is defined in Europe as being made exclusively from fermented grape juice, not like some of that . . . so-called ‘fruit wine’ you can buy. I like it when we allow things to remain what they are, and not let that definition drift. Terroir means that champagne is really only that when it comes from Champagne. Elsewise, it’s cava, or prosecco, or spumante—viticulture is still culture.”

  “The roses,” Miriam asks, keeping a steady eye on the barrel of that pistol. Just keep them talking. You may get out of this yet. “I wanted to ask. Why are there planters of roses at the end of every row of grapevines?”

  Emerson smiles. “Very perceptive, Miriam. You seem like a common girl, but you’re anything but—even on the run from a madman in a strange mask, you pick up on things.” He leans forward, seemingly pleased with the chance to explain something. “Roses are our canary in the coalmine. They are susceptible to many of the same diseases that plague our grapes, certain blights and rusts. But they suffer it first. So, if the roses begin to die, we know to begin a regimen of aggressive defense with the grapes.”

  “You learn something new every day,” Miriam says.

  “That is my goal,” Emerson says. “But it’s not only about learning something new, is it? It’s about contextualizing that—about finding the place of the new information in context with old, known information.” He stands up straight once more and reaches toward a wine rack. The corks face outward, and he wraps his long fingers around the neck of one bottle, withdrawing it and gently setting it down before her. “Wine, you see, is the product of learning new things, trying new things, but never ignoring what came before, either. It’s about using the past to build to the future.”

  And with that, he gently gives the wine bottle a half-turn.

  Its label now stands exposed to Miriam.

  Pinot Noir.

  Monterey County, California.

  Made and produced by—

  It feels like the stool has been kicked out from under her.

  It can’t be.

  Caldecott Vineyards.

  Emerson smiles a stiff little smile. “Have you had our wine before? It looks as if you might.”

  “Caldecott,” she says, her voice barely above a hoarse whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “Eleanor Caldecott.”

  “My sister.”

  She stares nails up at him. “She didn’t have any brothers or sisters. That’s what she told me.”

  “She lied. We have a very large family, I’m afraid. Eleanor was a bit of a . . . black sheep. What with the Carl Keener problem.”

  Eleanor Caldecott: head nurse at the Caldecott School, a girls’ school. Mother to the headmaster of that school, Edwin. Both of them, part of a family of serial killers that murdered dozens and dozens of girls under the auspices of that school.

  Eleanor and her family were the Mockingbird killer. Together. As one. And she had considerable feelings about fate, did she not?

  The woman told Miriam:

  Fate has a path. You step in. You change lives by ending lives. Don’t you? That’s what I do. What we do. As a family. We see those girls twisting in the wind—poisoned girls, damaged girls, ruined girls. Girls who will themselves become ruiners. Their lives are hurricanes and tornadoes, sweeping up everything in their paths and throwing them back to earth so hard, they shatter.

  Of one of their victims, Annie Valentine, Eleanor said:

  Annie Valentine’s death is a pure thing. A good thing. And good things, truly good things, don’t come without sacrifice. Hers is a garden of hate: leave the ground barren and only barren things grow. A dead child. A dead mother. So many others. Remove her from the timeline . . .

  And the garden grows.

  It was then that Eleanor mimed a pair of scissors with her two fingers, just as Emerson had. Emerson and Eleanor Caldecott. Alike in ways she didn’t even realize. Alike in ways she’s only just realizing now: Eleanor and the Mockingbird burned herbs in the beaked nose of the plague doctor mask they wore when they killed—burning roses and carnation—and further, she too had something of a green thumb. Miriam remembers the Caldecotts’ greenhouse. Verdant. Overgrown. The soil beneath each plant was dark
and rich, because it was compost made from the corpses of their victims.

  Dead girls.

  Dozens of dead girls. Girls who were ruiners, just as Miriam was a ruiner. Girls who were damaging some kind of timeline, who were infecting fate, who were breaking the pattern.

  “And we come full circle,” Emerson says.

  “Your sister. She had . . . abilities.”

  “Yes.” Even as he’s saying that word, he’s biting the finger of one of his gloves and pulling it off. His hand grabs her wrist forcefully—

  Noise. Howling wind. A keening frequency. Void and snow and—

  He lets go.

  “You’re cursed like me,” she says. She looks to Alejandro. The gun still points in her direction. He’s faking an easy, languid pose, but she sees that he’s coiled and ready to react. “Him too, I bet.”

  “Smart money,” Alejandro says, smirking.

  “Explain that.” Miriam quakes with quiet rage. “Explain how you do what you do, hunting and killing people like me even though you’re just like us. Does the hypocrisy of it get you off? Does it get you high?”

  “We have made a choice,” Emerson says, plainly. “We have chosen to reinforce the pattern. To salvage it. And that’s what you’ll do for us, Miriam. You have made your offer but I haven’t quite accepted it—let me give you the terms of the deal, and if we both agree, then we can celebrate our partnership. You will remain here. In this house. A guest, though admittedly one that is under careful watch and who cannot leave. We will see you through to the birth of your child—you’ve got, what, another twelve or thirteen weeks to go, I’d estimate? During those weeks, we will find this medium friend of yours and he or she will cooperate accordingly. And since you seem to know others of your kind, you’ll help us find them, too. You will rehabilitate yourself and pay for your ruinous ways by helping us find and eliminate others like you. And, ideally, helping us find this . . . demon of which you speak. This Ghost of the All-Dead. If it’s real, if it’s not just the delusion of some diseased mind, we will eliminate it as well.”

  Her hand twitches.