by Chuck Wendig
Not now, says the voice inside her head.
But dead just the same, says another.
Fuck it, not your problem.
Then whose problem is it?
SEP. Somebody. Else's. Problem. Who cares? Who appointed you Queen Fuck of Fatetown?
She's a poor young girl, and she's not just going to die, she's going to die spectacularly at the hands of some fucked-up monster in a freaky leather bird mask who gets high on smoking burned funeral flowers and… what? We're just going to let it go?
Who's we? We're just one person. Besides, you can't save anybody. And it's not like this is happening tomorrow. This is six years down the line.
Before she knows it, the drink is gone and her cell phone is ringing.
It's Louis.
Shit.
"Excuse me, Todd, I have to take this."
Todd isn't even standing there right now. She answers the call.
"Hey," she says, trying to sound nonchalant.
"Miriam," he says. "Listen–"
"No, you listen."
"Wait. Can I talk?"
"Fine. Sure. Whatever."
"I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. About earlier, about being pissy. It's just… hard sometimes. I know you don't want to be with me and sometimes we work and other times we're like fire and water and… you live at a much higher speed than me, Miriam. I'm just a lonely old bullfrog, and you're like, you're like a dragonfly flitting from reed to reed and–"
She interrupts. "Have you been drinking?"
"A little bit. It's been a bad day."
"Me too," she says. "Me too."
"My truck broke down."
"Oh. Oh, shit. That sucks."
"I still haven't delivered. I'm going to be a few days getting back. I thought I'd be back by tomorrow but – I'm really sorry. Do you need me? I can catch a bus if you need me there."
"I don't," she lies. "Everything is… good here."
"How's Katey?"
"She's got pancreatic cancer."
"Jesus."
"Yeah."
"I should call her."
"Don't! Don't." Because she doesn't know. "She just wants to spend the night… assilim… assimilating the news."
He sighs. "Yeah. You're probably right."
"I am always right."
Deep breath. Like this is tough for him. "Everything else is okay?"
"It's all… peach fuzz and popcorn. I don't even know what that means."
"I'll call you again."
"Okay."
"I miss you."
"Okay," she says.
Silence.
Say it back? Don't say it back? Does she miss him? Does she hate him? Love him? Want to fuck him? Want to punch him? All question, no answer.
"I'll talk to you, Miriam." His voice is brusque now. Gruff.
"Goodnight, Louis."
He ends the call.
She holds the phone there for a while, clucking her tongue. She says, "Miss you too."
Whatever. Fuck it. Fuck it all to hell.
"Uno mas," she tells Todd, nudging the empty glass toward him. It feels like she's got a storm brewing deep inside her, a mean typhoon with an endless hunger. She might as well feed the beast.
EIGHTEEN
Broke/n
Bam bam bam bam.
Her head feels like a water-logged cantaloupe.
Bam bam bam bam.
A muffled voice from the other side of the motel door: "Hey. You in there."
BAM BAM BAM BAM.
Now she knows why you're not supposed to tap on the aquarium glass. She feels like a goldfish undergoing a glacially slow aneurysm.
"Open the door or I'm coming in."
She crawls out of bed like a clumsy drunken baby, wearing nothing but a pair of panties. On hands and knees, head throbbing like it's bouncing around the inside of a kick drum, she creeps toward the door.
Door open. The light from outside is a curtain of white fire.
"Ow," she murmurs. "Wuzza?"
"You owe for tonight or you gotta go."
The fire recedes as her vision adjusts. Standing there is the motel manager. Not the lumpy pedo-bear who mans the front booth but rather a beefy Guido with hair so slick it looks like LEGO hair, like you could snap it on and snap it off. Pop, pop.
Miriam winces. Squints. Feels brain-squirrels – each famished, weaned on a week's worth of cheap delivery pizza and gallons of alcohol across the entire booze taxonomy – chew at the wiring inside her head.
"I'll bring you the money soon," she lies. She's out of cash. She's been hunkering down here for days. The room fee plus the food plus the booze plus the awful porn she's been buying non-stop (that and a few weepy boo hoo chick-flicks, whatever, shut up) has left her pretty much broke.
Louis hasn't come back, either. He got his truck fixed but said he had some "emergency work."
She figures he doesn't want to see her.
She doesn't blame him. She doesn't want to see herself, either.
"You gotta pay or you gotta go."
"I said, soon. Gimme a few minutes."
"You don't got a few minutes. You're already hours past the deadline. Pay up or pack up." He looks her up and down. A dismissive sniff. But hungry, too. Like his eyes are mouths and they're enjoying the meal. "You don't have the money?"
"Fine. No. I do not have the money."
"Then you gotta go."
"Whatever. Just give me fifteen minutes and I'll be out."
"You don't have fifteen minutes. You have one minute."
"What? No fucking way. Nobody can do anything in one minute. You can't even microwave a cup of coffee in a minute. Don't be an asshole."
Her skull pulses, like her heart has taken the elevator to the penthouse and now throbs dully behind her eyeballs.
"Well," he says, and she knows what's coming before he says it, "you know, we could work something out."
And his gaze drifts over her thighs, her hips, her tits.
His licentious stare finally reaches her face just as she punches him–
Curled up, fetal ball, neon lights from a bar or a strip club or a schmaltzy motel bathe him in alternating pink and blue. He's forty-eight and drunk and he's been drunk for a long time. His liver looks and feels like a football packed with beef fat, bound up tight with a crusty leather belt, and it's then that the alcohol poisoning punches him hard – he lays down, passes out, pukes in his own mouth. A sharp hitch of breath brings the regurgitate into his lungs – aspirating his last meal, which was basically a shitload of vodka and bar peanuts. Death by lungbarf.
–in the nose. The bridge of the nose in particular.
Right now, he's probably seeing stars.
Twin trails of blood crawl from his nostrils like mealworms.
Miriam slams the door, throws closed the night latch, and then hurries through the room, yanking on clothes and pitching her stuff into her bag. It's hell on her hangover, and it feels like she's in a nightmare running through wet concrete but what's done is done. That asshole's either going to call the cops or–
BAM BAM BAM
KICK KICK KICK
"You fucking bitch!"
–he's going to come in here and beat her into a gelatinous pulp.
Miriam goes to the bathroom, pushes out the back window. Gets one last look at herself in the mirror – the pink streaks she dyed in her hair a few days ago please her, the rest bleached white like fingers of bone – before squirming through the open hole and dropping onto the back parking lot.
She runs. Far as she can without wheezing and needing a cigarette.
She finds herself back at the river. The water today – winding along a weed-choked abandoned lot – is gray and foamy. The sky above the color of slate. Water and sky, merging together. An unappealing liver-mush.
Cigarette. Lighter. Ahhh.
To her right: a twig-snap. The Guido. She wheels.
No. Not him.
The Trespasser.
"Your gash
is healing nicely." It's the girl. Lauren. Not the young girl but her eighteen-year-old future self. The skin around her neck is a vented flap crusted with blood.
Breath whistles through the slit.
Miriam moves and feels the place where the gunman's bullet dug a gully in her head. It's healing up. Still, she could peel the scab if she wanted to. She thinks about it. Doesn't, for now.
"Yours isn't." She looks at the girl walking with her by the river. Overhead a plane drifts. "Maybe try a little Neosporin on that neck."
"Oh, Miriam. Deflect, deflect, deflect. Trying to forget."
"I prefer when you visit me in dreams. The hallucinations freak me out a little."
"I prefer the term 'visions'."
"Like, vision quest? Maybe I'm doped up on some kind of trippy jungle tea and soon it'll be time to fight the Jaguar Queen, cut out her heart, eat it."
"Maybe cut off her head."
To this, Miriam says nothing.
The Trespasser begins to sing: "Signs, signs, everywhere a sign. Blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind." The girl cranes her neck. Exposes the bloodless hole of her esophagus. "Did you see the killer's tat?"
"The bird."
"The swallow."
"The swallow, right."
The Trespasser nods. "In Egyptian myth, the swallow used to sit at the front of any boat going into the Underworld. But it went beyond that. Some cultures see the swallow as a malignant, malevolent creature. A real dirty-birdy. A curse. The swallow is all over mythology."
"I don't know that. So how do you know that?"
A happy trill. The killer's laugh."The swallow," the Trespasser continues, "is a symbol cast far and wide. You should look into it."
"Sounds like school stuff."
"Maybe it is. If only you knew where a school happened to be."
"If only," Miriam says, seeing ahead the driveway leading to the iron gates of the Caldecott School. "If only."
"You have work to do," the Trespasser says.
"I know. I know."
She knows.
But the Trespasser is gone.
NINETEEN
The Way is Shut
"Uh-uh," Homer says. "Nope. No way. Go on. Get out of here."
Miriam stands at the iron bars, hands wrapped around them, face pressed between them. "I'm not going to be long. Seriously. Let me in."
"Hell no. You messed up. You're on the list." He leans out of his booth and lowers his voice. "And between you and me, it ain't a good list."
"But I'm a friend of Louis."
"I don't owe that dude anything! He's just a nice one-eyed white man who comes up here and does a little charity work for the school. We ain't war buddies or anything. He didn't save me from a shark attack. Shit."
"I'll give you money."
Homer's eyes narrow. "How much money?"
"How much will it take?"
He thinks. "Fifty bucks."
"Forty."
"Fifty."
"Fine."
"So why don't you hand it up through the gate now."
She winces. "Yeah. I don't actually have fifty dollars."
"Ain't that a shame."
"I'll owe it to you."
"I don't take IOUs from crazy bitches."
"That's not nice."
"But it's true."
Yeah.
"What if I just… climbed over the fence?"
"Then I'd call the cops on your ass."
"But oh, the paperwork. I'm sure you'd have to do paperwork. And paperwork sucks. Am I right? Damn the man. And his… paperwork."
He laughs. "What, you think I got something better to do? I sit here in a booth watching a gate that generally ain't worth watching. I'd do some paperwork just for a change of pace. Might even doodle some smiley faces or boobies up in the corners for fun."
"Okay. Fine. What if I snuck in elsewhere? You wouldn't know."
"Electric fence would probably zap your ass."
She furrows her brow. "Electric fence? You're shitting me."
"Nope. Bzzt."
"That's a bit extreme."
"Sometimes the girls try to run away. Since some of them are court-mandated to be here and others actually end up in the school's custody, they ain't necessarily allowed to leave."
"So this place is like a prison."
"For some. A real nice-looking prison, but a prison all the same."
She rubs her face. She's tired. The hangover behind her eye sockets paces in its cage, clawing the ground.
"So. I'm not getting back in here, am I?"
"Guess not, lady."
She snorts. "Lady. That's a good one." Miriam thrusts out her hand. Option of last resort. "It's been real, Homer."
He shrugs like whatever, takes her hand–
Hospital room. All gray but for the few flowers that brighten the place and a TV flickering in the corner. Homer lies in bed, staring up at the ceiling, eyes like blank chalkboards because nobody's home. He's dead but he's not dead – body still ticking, brain mostly gone, mind a dead garden of rotting vegetables. And then it's like whatever last bit of him is standing on the lip just… slips off into darkness, and suddenly the monitors are going off and a resident comes in with a crash cart. A woman and a young girl rush in, the woman crying out for her father, the young girl shell-shocked because she's never seen anything like this before, and then Homer's gone, really gone, gone-gone.
"You've got a granddaughter," she blurts, pulling her hand away.
"So?" he says, suddenly suspicious.
"She's not a student…" Miriam tosses a thumb at the Caldecott School.
"No. Hell no. She's a good girl. Got a mother who takes care of her. And me."
Miriam isn't really in the mood to be genuine, but here goes. "You know why I'm here, Homer?"
"I bet you're gonna tell me."
"I am. I see things, Homer. Wanna know what I spy with my psychic eye? That you have a daughter." Miriam closes her eyes. Remembers the vision. "She's about five-five. Smells like lavender. Hair short. Got a birthmark on her neck. Like a little pinky print. Her daughter, your granddaughter, well, right now I'm guessing she's around eleven or twelve. Pigtails. Braces."
Homer tightens up. "Doesn't have braces." He looks down. "But they're saying she needs 'em. And I gave Wanda the money already so that she can go ahead with it. How you know all this? How I know you're not just messing with me? Some kind of con-job."
"You don't. But here's what I'm gonna tell you, Homer-old-pal. I'm going to tell you that there's a girl in there, a young girl about the same age your granddaughter is now, and this girl is going to die. Someone is going to kill her. I know this because I can see this, and I'm going to stop it. But I can't do that if you don't let me back in there."
"You're crazy," he says.
"Maybe. Probably. Yeah. But I'm also right."
"I'll let you in," he says, finally.
"Thanks. You want to know how you die?"
He chews on it. Shakes his head. "Naw."
And with that, he opens the gate.
TWENTY
True Confessions of a Living Dead Girl
The girls stare. They watch her sneak in through a side entrance. A few look worried. Others giggle and smirk and turn away. Some give Miriam a little head-nod, as though in recognition from one bad girl to another.
It's between classes. The girls don't have lockers: They have cubby-holes, all open, no doors. No way to hide a pack of smokes or a bottle of Jack or any other contraband. Or so Miriam thinks until she walks up to one set of cubbyholes, interrupting a huddle of girls there. Teen girls. Around fourteen or fifteen years old.
They turn toward her with a gasp, their faces covered in crumbs.
One girl, a Latina with fake eyelashes that look like tarantula legs, turns away. Another, a white girl with chubby cheeks but a body as thin and featureless as a leafless sapling, wipes a smear of chocolate from her lips.
A wrapper crackles as they try to hide it.