Vultures

by Chuck Wendig

  Miriam oofs as she and Gabby swallow one another in their embrace. “Ow,” she says.

  “Sorry,” Gabby says, kissing her on the cheek, then the mouth, then going in for another trash compactor hug. Miriam, for her part, is not a passive participant. She’s not trapped in the hug like a guy caught under a vending machine he rocked back and forth in order to get the bag of Hot Cheetos that he was owed by the wretched snack box. She’s into it. It just hurts because right now, everything hurts. And itches.

  Someone else clears their throat in the apartment—

  Miriam turns and sees that Steve Wiebe is here.

  “I got your voicemail,” he says, the words babbling out of him, “and I about pissed my pants because, like, holy fuck, what? You were in trouble, so I did like you said, I got in touch with Guerrero—I didn’t even hesitate, I knew they might want to arrest me, but I had to do something and—”

  “You saved me,” Miriam says. It’s partly true. Guerrero knew where she was, but only Wiebe told them she was in trouble and needed their intervention. “Thanks.”

  “Life’s short, right?” he says, a nervous chord plucked in those three words. Because she knows, and he knows, that his life is shorter now than he’d like. “But it’s long enough for a hug.”

  He opens his arms.

  “I don’t usually do this,” she says. “Hugging people.”

  “You just hugged Gabby.”

  “Gabby and I embraced. Because we fuck each other and love one another. That said, you did good, Underwear Man.”

  And she hugs him.

  It doesn’t even hurt.

  It even feels a little bit nice.

  A little bit.

  But all this is distraction. Miriam knows that. She has to get to the heart of the matter—forget the Starfucker, forget David Guerrero, to hell with Emerson Caldecott. He is a problem for Future Miriam.

  Present Miriam has a different problem.

  As she pulls away from Steve Wiebe, she says to Gabby, “Tell me it’s true. Tell me Guerrero didn’t lie to me.” She draws a deep breath. “Tell me you found Abraham Lukauskis.”

  “I . . . ,” Gabby starts.

  And with that, someone comes shambling out of the bathroom. He wears a ragtag mess of clothes: a black T-shirt over his sallow frame, then a ratty gray hoodie over the T-shirt, then a rat-chewed black bathrobe over the hoodie. His salt-and-pepper hair is long and matted, and barely seems separate from the similarly long and matted beard, which drapes down over his chest because he has the posture of a broken coatrack. He grunts as he shuffles out.

  “You,” he says, his voice deep and full-throated, growling like an ancient tomb being opened. He looks at Miriam. “You are the disruption.”

  Gabby whispers in her ear: “I found him.”

  “Where?” she faux-whispers back. “In Hell?”

  “Basically.”

  SEVENTY

  THE MEDIUM

  Lukauskis messily eats SpaghettiOs. They stick in his beard, little life preservers of pasta trapped in blobby suspensions of bright orange sauce. He’s noisy at it, too. Slurping and chewing. Smacking and humming to himself. He stares into the bowl as he eats, a prophet looking for secret truths in the configuration of carbohydrate zeroes.

  He sits at one side of their little nook table. Everybody else—Miriam, Gabby, Steve—stands at the other side, watching him.

  Miriam leans into Gabby: “Did we have a can of SpaghettiOs? I would’ve eaten that.”

  “He brought his own,” she says, horrified.

  “I brought my own,” he reiterates.

  “He brought his own!” Steve Wiebe chimes in, his voice sounding like it’s nearing the edge of madness, like he’s not really sure if he should stay for whatever it is that’s happening here.

  “So,” Miriam says, loudly, too loudly. “You’re the medium.”

  “I’m the medium.” His voice is a curious combination of California Stoner and Eastern European Pierogi-Maker. He comes from somewhere else, but he’s clearly been here a while. “And you’re the disruption.”

  “You keep saying that, but I don’t know what it means.”

  He mumbles to himself, then shoves another spoonful of canned pasta into his beard-cave. “I don’t know what it means either.”

  “And yet maybe you could try to explain it? Pretty please?”

  “Hnnh. Hngh. Fine. Fine.” He takes a napkin—translation: his own hoodie sweatshirt—and wipes his mouth with it. He licks his lips and sucks gnarly curls of his own beard into his mouth, siphoning food off of them. “You are haunted. You are broken. And you are breaking things by being haunted. I see—” He stands up now and gestures, not toward Miriam but toward the space all around her. “A disruption. I had seen it before. Heard it whispered on the wind, heard it bubbled up through sewer slots. Bad energy flowing toward a vulnerable point, like water leaking through a crack in the bathroom tile. The dead are dying. The spirits are losing themselves. Disruption. You’re it.”

  Miriam looks to Gabby.

  Then to Steve.

  They look back at her.

  “None of that made a lick of fucking sense,” Miriam says.

  “Doesn’t have to,” Lukauskis says. “Monkeys don’t understand gravity, but gravity is still gravity.”

  “I think he just called us monkeys,” Gabby says.

  “Kinda rude, to be honest,” Steve says.

  “Kinda rude, to be honest,” Lukauskis says, in a mocking tone.

  “You know,” Steve Wiebe begins, like he’s about to go on a tirade, but Miriam has no time for any of this. He sees her look and clamps up.

  “I am haunted,” Miriam says, suddenly.

  The room falls quiet.

  “I have a Trespasser. I don’t know if it—or he, or she—gave me this power or what. I don’t even know what it is. For a long time, I thought it was just in my head. And maybe it was, once. But now it’s getting out. If I am its prison, it’s figured out how to escape—it’s not out, not all the way, but this thing is testing its routes, its pathways, and it knows where to go even if it doesn’t have the tunnel dug all the way out yet. My mother called this thing by a different name. She said it was the Ghost of All-Dead.”

  “Your mother?” Gabby asks in a low voice.

  “My mother.”

  “Miriam, your mom is—”

  “Yes, yeah, I know, she’s dead. But she came to me in a . . . dream or something, and told me this thing’s name, and now I’m telling all of you.”

  “The Ghost of All-Dead,” Lukauskis says.

  His voice, too, is small.

  It is, if Miriam reads it right, afraid.

  Which makes her afraid. If something scares this guy—

  Then it ought to scare them all.

  “You know what it is?” she asks him.

  “I do.”

  And then he tells them.

  INTERLUDE

  THE GHOST OF ALL-DEAD

  Once upon a time, things were as things were.

  People died. They left a piece of themselves behind. Sometimes, that piece was more powerful than whatever part of them moved on to the next world, and if that piece was powerful enough, it could affect our world.

  A ghost, a spirit. Wraith, specter, haunt, haint, apparition. Sometimes, these entities are peaceful. Many times, they are lost and confused. Other times, they are angry, vengeful things, because the piece that stayed behind is the worst piece: a part of the soul broken off, forcefully, painfully, with great trauma and consequence.

  This is the cycle of things. It sounds unnatural but it is the way. Death happens. Death cleaves off a little bitty piece. That piece remains.

  On and on. On and on.

  I can see the pieces that remain. I can speak to them.

  I have been with the spirits for most of my life. Or perhaps they have been with me. They are with me now. Like a cloud of flies.

  But this cloud of flies has dimmed. Thinned out. Those who remain have
dwindled—and some of those who remain have gone from peaceful to angry. This was not always the case. Angry spirits could be made passive, but passive spirits were never turned the other way. Trauma could be resolved in the truly dead, but not reinstituted.

  A darkness is thrust through the lingering dead. A shadow cast upon them. A disruption. They are agitated. They speak of it in babbled songs and lunatic monologues. They do not understand it or know what it is.

  Sometimes, I see them moving together, like a herd of the spectral dead. Moving down streets or through fields. Whistling through the grass toward something. The anger is plain on their faces, and they are always committed; they cannot be swayed. They will not even speak to me. Their anger, their grief, it’s thick around them like a miasma. I can feel it clinging to me like grease. It makes me angry. It makes me sad. I come away from it feeling rage and sorrow in equal portion.

  I thought one day to discover what this was, this mad migration. So, I went to places with a great deal of death energy. Places where I have more power, though places where the dead have more power too. I can trap the spirits there. I can stick them to this world, temporarily—like a thumb pressing down on the head of the snake. The tail whips, but the snake cannot move. I found one apparition: a young man, a hiker, killed in the woods by a hunter of men. Chased, tormented, shot through the neck. I trapped him inside a coyote. I asked him, why do you do this? Why do you flee, and where do you go? And he said, I go to be with the Ghost of All-Dead. I go to join with the others and break the cycle.

  Then the coyote’s jaws cracked wide open. Impossibly wide. It broke out of my trap. It came for me, eyes the color of fire and blood, ribs breaking free of its skin like the tiny bones broken in a man’s crushed foot. It tore into me. Ripped up my side. Clawed at my breastbone like a dog trying to dig up a toy it had buried, but my heart was the toy it sought. I did not manage to fight it off but was lucky simply because the body could no longer hold the spirit. It split like the skin of a kidney bean. All of what was inside the animal came spilling out. Including the spirit, who fled.

  I did not want to go to the hospital, but on the way back to my house, on the bus, I lost consciousness and awakened in a hospital.

  I hate hospitals. Many dead are trapped there. Lost and looking for a way back. They came to my bedside every night. Some of them pleaded with me to help them, to give them resolution. Others harangued me, called me terrible names, told me I would be punished for meddling. That the Ghost of All-Dead would one day see me, and then it would be over.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  DEATH THAT FEEDS ON DEATH

  “That was two years ago,” he says, standing there, swaying back and forth gently like a sapling in a strong breeze.

  “Where was this?” Miriam asks.

  “Same place your friend here found me.”

  “Black Star Canyon,” Gabby says. Way she says it, her words are shot through with a frequency of real fear. “That place . . . Something’s not right about it, Miriam. It’s wrong. Like a painting on the wall you know is hung wrong, at a funny angle, but you just can’t seem to fix it.”

  Abraham nods. “It’s the energy of death there. It feeds on itself, creates the condition of death—like a fire that needs no fuel to thrive but for the presence of more fire. Some say the place was marked first with the slaughter of Indian horse thieves by American trappers who were hired as mercenaries to reclaim the stolen horses. It continued with the death of James Gregg at the hands of Henry Hungerford—once again, a dispute over a horse, this time a fight over a price that turned deadly. Squatters hide there and have shot at hikers and bikers. Killed two. Some say there have been sacrifices there of animal and human, and I can confirm the former—not only because I sacrificed that coyote, though I did not mean to. Others claim Satanist cults operate there, which is true, though far less sinister than others imagine: Satanists, I’ve found, are really quite nice people.”

  “I can confirm this,” Steve Wiebe says. “I’ve driven a few to their meetings. They’re pretty rad.”

  “Great,” Miriam says, poorly hiding her irritation. “So, the spirits of the dead are . . . joining with the Ghost of All-Dead. I still don’t understand.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t understand it either, except that if this is the thing that haunts you, you’re neck-deep in particularly foul shit.”

  “Kind of you to say.”

  “The Ghost of All-Dead is a consumptive thing. Greedy. It is gathering souls to it. Why, I cannot say.”

  “Maybe it’s not one thing. Maybe it’s a collective of them,” she says. “It would explain a few things. How it seems to take different shapes and voices. It isn’t the same every time.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps it is a catalog of the dead. A hive mind of specters, a colony of the killed. But why?”

  A chill passes through Miriam. “Cycles. You talk about cycles. It’s the way of things: people die, they leave bits behind. I’ve also heard talk of . . . patterns. Tapestries. All of it being a part of something greater. Things were what things were.” Suddenly, her mother’s voice echoes in her ear: It is what it is, Miriam. “Maybe it’s trying to break that cycle. Life and death and whatever is left between them. It’s angry. It wants . . . vengeance. It believes death isn’t fair and so it wants to break it all apart.” Her knees start to buckle. “It’s trying to use me to break it all apart.”

  “You might be right.’

  Miriam barely stifles a small gasp. She has to sit down or fall down, so she roughly drags a chair over to collapse onto. Her eyes focus on a point in space a million miles away. Through everything. Away from here.

  No, fuck this. She stands back up so suddenly, she nearly knocks over the chair. Miriam paces, then takes a hard turn and veers pointedly toward the bathroom. She spies herself in the mirror looking tired, lost, wayward—her eyes look puffy, like she’s ready to cry. Fuck this, too. No mirror. Into the bedroom, then, there she goes, into the dark of that room, the blinds down, and she thinks the darkness should be comforting and quiet but it’s not, because she’s still there, herself, no matter where she goes—

  There she is.

  “Fuck,” she says, a strangled word.

  Gabby enters in behind her. A gentle hand on her shoulder.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine wait no I’m not fucking fine. Fuck. Fuck! I’m a dupe, Gabby. It’s all a ruse and I’m just the mark. Dog on a leash. Puppet on a fucking hand. I haven’t done any good. I’ve just . . . fucked up. I’ve fucked up on behalf of some kind of pissed-off ghost—this thing isn’t even some nightmare hallucination I conjured, it’s real, and it’s been pushing me down this path for so long, I came to believe that what I’ve been doing is somehow the right thing. But I’m not a hero. I’m a villain. I’m a goddamn tragedy.”

  “Miriam, whatever that thing wanted from you, you did what you did because you felt it was right. We’re all here because of you.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  “I don’t mean it like that. I mean . . . we’re here because we love you and we trust you. And we’re here to help. To do whatever you need us to do. Okay? Don’t focus on the past. Don’t focus on what that thing wanted from you. You were in control. You did the best you could. It’s okay.”

  It’s okay.

  On the one hand, she needs to hear that.

  On the other hand, to hell with that.

  It isn’t okay.

  None of this is okay.

  But she can still make it okay.

  “Gabby, it’s not long now. Not long before . . . before the doctor dies. Beagle. Before you kill him. You realize that, don’t you? The clock is counting down. Days now. But maybe we can fix it.”

  She kisses Gabby hard, leaving the other woman stunned and bewildered. Miriam whirls past her, past Steve, who stands in the hallway and says as she passes, “You left me in there with the crazy man. Please don’t leave me alone with the crazy man—”

  But she’s already moving to
ward Lukauskis. The medium stares at her with strange, hound-dog eyes. His eyes are intense, and sad, too. Beneath those eyes hang piles of skin, bags of them, bags so heavy, he probably has to pay a shitload of extra fees to get on a fucking airplane. He stares at her.

  “What do you want to do, Miriam?” he asks.

  “I want this thing gone. I want to find it. I want to trap it. I want to kill it, or whatever it means to destroy something that’s already dead. And I want you to help me, Lukauskis. You’re going to help me.”

  He nods. “Yes, I will. But it will not be easy. Go, eat, rest, do what you need to do. We will leave here soon. We must be there at midnight, for that is when the wall between worlds is thin.”

  “Where is there?”

  “Where else? Black Star Canyon.”

  SEVENTY-TWO

  THE TRUTH ABOUT OCTOPUSES, PISS-JARS, AND TSARIST MYSTICS

  They leave long after dark, 10 PM. Steve drives. Gabby in the front seat. Miriam in the back with the shambling pile of darkness called “Abraham Lukauskis.” The car swims through the garish lights and neon sea of Los Angeles at night: the smear of fast-food signs, tattoo parlors, movie theaters. The dull thud of bass rises up under the road to meet them as they pass the hip-hop car, then a dubstep car, then a heavy metal car. Through the city, to I-5, to 91, the highway stop-and-go even now, even at night. The Los Angeles highway system, Miriam thinks, is a special kind of purgatory, and she idly wonders if these drivers never leave it. They eat here, sleep here, work here. Fast food and audiobooks and conference calls and pissing out the window, maybe shitting in the fast-food bag. Consigned to the occult hell of the endless, deadlocked highways.

  Miriam thinks about this because it’s easier than thinking about how Abraham Lukauskis smells. It’s not that he smells as expected: it’s not body odor, or trash, or piss. He smells strongly like an autumnal pinecone. Cinnamon and clove. Like he’s just come from an orgy with Father Christmas and Pumpkin Spice. Was Pumpkin Spice a Spice Girl? Miriam can’t remember. She should’ve been, at any rate.