by Chuck Wendig
“So why do you do it?”
“I don’t really know. Why do you?”
Miriam narrows her eyes. “Do you see them? The visions? Every time, I mean. Do you know what everyone needs to find?”
“If they look into my eyes, I know.”
“Do you tell them?”
“Almost never. Not unless they want to know.”
“Is it hard? Seeing all that?”
“Not as hard as it must be for you.” She brings the lantern close, bathing one side of her face in the artificial glow. “But it’s still pretty strange. Oh – don’t forget to buy some suntan lotion.”
INTERLUDE
NOW
“So,” Grosky asks, “what’s in the box?”
He knocks on the metal box beneath his hand. Clunk clunk.
Miriam sneers. “I don’t know, genius. You interrupted me before I could open it.”
The big guy smiles. “We’re good at that.”
“I noticed.”
“This other woman was a, you know–” he touches both forefingers to his temples, whistles the Twilight Zone theme “–psychic lady. She has powers like you. Shit, maybe we shoulda been talking to her this whole time.”
“Why are you talking to me?” Miriam asks. Vills watches her the way a cat watches a cockroach and Miriam thinks, It should be the other way around, asshole. “What’s your endgame? Because I’m not seeing it.”
“We’ll get there–” Grosky starts to say.
“We have no endgame with you,” Vills says by way of interruption.
Grosky gives his partner a surprised look.
Vills says, “Christ, Richie, this girl is just stringing us along. Don’t you see that? Admitting to all this like it’s no big thing. Pretending she’s a, a, a goddamn psychic? We’re being played, Richie! Let’s just pack up our stuff and hit the bricks–”
“Catherine, lemme handle this. At the very least, we get to sit here in a shack by the beach, a nice breeze coming in through those beautiful broken windows over there, and Miriam here tells us a little story.”
“Richie, sometimes I swear, you have your head up your–”
“Uh-oh,” Miriam says. She affects a little girl’s voice. “Mommy and Daddy are fighting.”
They both shoot her an eat-shit-and-die look.
“Cath, just sit down. You gotta remember, I’m the top dog here. I been here longer than you–”
Vills rolls her eyes. “This crap again.”
“It isn’t crap. Don’t call it crap. Don’t diminish what I’m saying to you. Don’t take away from my years here in the behavioral unit–”
“Like you’re some kind of flawless gem of behavioral analysis. You don’t even have a degree–”
He barks a hard laugh. “You don’t have a degree, either!”
“At least I’ve been out there. With the bad guys. You totter out into the field with your tracksuit or that ugly Hawaiian shirt with the mustard stain on the collar while the rest of us show up for work dressed for success. When was the last time you even fired your pistol?”
Grosky turns suddenly toward Miriam: the parent beseeching the child to turn against the other. “See, Vills here has only been working with me for a couple years. She got transferred to me–”
“As punishment!” Vills shrieks, face a rictus of inconsolable fury.
“She got transferred to me from–”
Now it’s Miriam’s turn to jump in. “Ooh-ooh, lemme guess: vice. Or whatever the drug unit is for you FBI types.”
Grosky nods. Vills keeps shouting.
“I worked for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and I lent support to local law enforcement in the country’s HIDTAs – the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. Albuquerque, Phoenix, New Orleans–”
“Miami,” Miriam adds. Then she taps her head. “See? Psychic.”
Suddenly Grosky is pounding on the table with the side of his fist, wham wham wham, the metal box jumping with each punch.
“Shut up,” Grosky says. “The both of you.”
He sits back down. He’s broken out in a sweat. His cheeks are flushed like red water balloons. He takes out a white handkerchief, dabs the perspiration on his upper lip, licks it, then dabs it again.
Miriam whistles a low uh-oh whistle.
“Vills,” Grosky says. “Siddown. We’re staying. I’m seeing this through, and then I’ll decide what we’re gonna do with Miss Black. And you, Miriam–”
“Sit down, shut up, watch your mouth. Blah blah blah.”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Fine.” I got what I wanted out of this, she thinks. Vills’ cage has been successfully rattled. “You wanna hear the rest of the story, or what?”
Grosky nods, but then says, “Hey, by the way, I’m real sorry about your mother.”
Miriam’s stomach drops out of her. She feels suddenly unfixed from the earth, as if she’s on an elevator going up and everything else is going down.
“Thanks,” she says.
Vills looks at her watch.
Miriam continues the story, starting with, “I needed a gun.”
FORTY-TWO
LITTLE LADY HANDS
Miriam needs a gun.
She’s got money, but no gun. She ditched the .38 – the one she used to shoot that robber. Or mugger. (That poor kid is who he was.) There’s a difference between the two, isn’t there? Whatever. She can’t be bothered by that right now. And she can’t be bothered by that dumb kid, either – even now, with his face leering back at her, reflected in the streetlight flashes on the windshield glass of the Malibu. His blood-streaked, ashen mouth. He was a murderer. (You’re a murderer too, a small voice reminds her – a voice carried around the inside of her head, a ricocheting bullet.)
She can’t mourn him.
He made his choices. She made hers.
That’s how she hardens her heart against it.
Because she has no time to do anything else.
Getting that gun (don’t you mean the murder weapon?) took time. She saved up some money from her little WILL PSYCHIC FOR FOOD experiment. Then she went to a gun show north of the city in a place called Oaks. Table after table of people selling ammo, ammo cases, knives, Nazi propaganda, KKK propaganda, Vietnam-era artifacts–
And oh, yeah, guns.
Buy from a private seller, slip through the loophole. No background check. No signing anything. Fork over cash, get handed a gun.
Guy at the table was all bro-macho about it. “What’s a little girl like you need with a gun?”
And she got cocky with him. “To make sure I don’t get raped by flannel-wearing survivalist assholes like you.”
She thought: He’s either gonna get mad and try to break my jaw or he’s gonna tell me to fuck off and buy a gun from someone else. But all he did was shrug and say, “Whatever, bitch. Your money’s still green.”
That’s how she ended up with a little .38 Smith & Wesson snubnose.
Guy who sold it to her got one last jab in: “Little gun for little lady hands.” She let it slide without pistol-whipping him, a fact she still upholds as a significant achievement and a clear watermark for personal growth.
Now, though, parked in the shadows of a long highway cutting down through the Keys, she doesn’t have that option. No gun show here. Not tonight. And tonight’s when she wants to do this.
No waiting.
Because time’s the wolf at her door.
So, what to do, what to do?
No gun shows right now. But this is Florida. It’s like a hillbilly Hawaii down here. Every time you see the news it’s Florida Man Did This and Florida Man Did That. Florida Man gorges on bath salts, eats some lady’s face. Florida Man tries to fuck an alligator, gets his dick stuck. Florida Man tries to hang-glide onto a cruise ship and take a shit on the shuffleboard deck. Plus, down here it’s like everyone thinks they’re Charles Bronson from Death Wish. So, they have gun shops.
She just has to hope that one of
them is open after 10 at night.
A pawn shop, maybe.
For this, she needs to go back to the motel and grab the phone book she saw sitting on the bedside table. That’s not too far from here – another twenty to thirty minutes. Won’t kill her plans.
At the motel, everything’s quiet. Moths and flies and mosquitoes gather around the glowing light of a Coke machine under the stairway to Jerry’s office. Miriam heads around the back end of the property, following the path until she gets to her door – and someone clears his throat behind her.
She wheels.
It’s the burn-out. Sitting on his lawn chair.
Behind him, a zapper sends bugs to their crispy, crackly dooms.
“They call these islands Los Martires,” he says, like they’ve been in conversation for hours, like their last conversation never really stopped. “The Martyrs. When explorers came up in the night, they saw these shapes in the moonlight looking like suffering men hunched over the water. Like, prostating themselves before their god and shit.”
“I think you mean prostrating.”
“I don’t think there’s a difference.”
“There’s a pretty big fucking difference.”
“Oh. OK. Anyway, so, I think that’s pretty cool. Because this place is all easy like Sunday morning and shit, but even in paradise we suffer, you know? We suffer.”
“That’s great. I have to–”
“Gotta lot of great names for some of the Keys, too, you know. Shelter Key. Knockemdown Key. Soldier Key. The Ragged Keys–”
“I really enjoy our time together, Florida Man,” she says, suddenly realizing this is the guy eating faces and fucking alligators and hang-gliding onto cruise ships to take shuffleboard dumps. “Lemme ask you something else. You know where a girl can buy a gun?”
“A gun? Whoa.”
“That’s right.” She mimes a gun with her thumb and forefinger and makes pchoo pchoo sounds.
“Most places are probably closed. I know Billy’s Pawn up in Key Largo would be open, but shoot, Billy’s on a fishing trip and the shop’s closed while he’s out there.”
“That doesn’t help me.”
“South of here is Kitty’s Range and they sell ammo there, and sometimes you can find fliers and whatever on the corkboard, but Kitty’s is definitely closed by now.”
“That still doesn’t help me. Listen, Florida Man, it’s been super-crazy-fun-times hanging out but I gotta–”
“You could have my gun, I guess.”
“Your gun?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. It’s a Springfield knock-off of the Colt 1911 .45. Or maybe it’s a Colt knockoff of the Springfield. Shit, I dunno. I’ll go get it.” And then he gets up out of his chair – an act so slow it’s like watching a glacier form over the epochs of time – grunting and groaning and moaning as he does, before tottering off to his double-wide.
Miriam stands out there. Bugs biting. Sunburned skin growing tighter and tighter – so tight she thinks it might split like a sausage casing.
Two minutes. Five minutes. Fifteen.
He went in there and… well, she has no idea what. Fell asleep on the toilet. Drowned himself in the bathtub. Got eaten by the alligator he was trying to cornhole.
That was fun while it lasted.
She turns around with her keys–
And sure enough, here comes Florida Man.
He’s got the pistol in his hand like he’s ready to start shooting people. He strolls up, walking less like a person and more a self-propelled collection of dirty rubber bands, and he points the gun right at her.
“Here you go,” he says.
She stares. “That’s maybe not the best way to hand someone a gun.”
“Huh?” He looks down. “Oh.” He gingerly uses both hands to turn the gun around so the grip is facing her.
As she takes it, his finger brushers her finger and–
He’s 105 years old and looks like some kind of sun-baked beach mummy. He sits on a dock with a can of Schlitz in his arthritic claw and his body just… gives up. Everything goes slack. All his organs power down like someone turned off a breaker somewhere. The can drops out of his hand and rolls into the ocean, beer foaming over the edge. He laughs and farts a little fart and then it’s a slow, comfortable brain death.
–and she pulls back, honestly surprised. No bath salt cannibalism. No hang-glider defecations. Zero alligator fucking. She’s almost disappointed, but she finds solace in the fact that Ashley doesn’t find him, too.
“You die well,” she says.
“Thanks.” He nods like he understands, though he surely does not. “My name’s Dave.”
“My name’s Miriam.”
“Cool. You gonna shoot some cans or something?”
“Or something.”
“Cool.”
FORTY-THREE
MURDER WAS THE CASE THAT THEY GAVE ME
Gun in her lap. Foot on the pedal.
She tried to give Dave the Florida Man a couple hundred bucks from her stash, but he didn’t want it.
So she took the money, hid it under the motel bed, and hit the road.
Now she’s out on the highway.
She tastes blood. Her trigger finger aches.
In the seat next to her, the thug with the blown scalp covers up a laugh with his hand. “You gonna kill the right motherfucker this time?”
“I am,” she says.
And she is.
FORTY-FOUR
SUMMERLAND
Midnight.
Moon in ribbons on black water.
Miriam stands at the edge of someone’s yard at the southernmost point of Summerland Key. An abandoned white house sits, lights out, fifty yards down. Around her are half-collapsed deck chairs and rotting picnic tables. Unlit torches. Swaying palms like black fractal shadows.
She doesn’t know who owns this place. The fence has long blown to the ground, the white paint peeling off the pickets, the wood rotting.
Easy entry, then.
Pale gravel grinds under her boots. Like little knucklebones. Like the ones Ingersoll kept in that pouch of his.
A minivan sits parked nearby. Also dark.
She steps up past all that, walks right to the water’s edge.
There, in the distance, a small island.
Two big trees stand above all the others like hands reaching for the sky. As if hoping to grab the moon and forever failing to do so. What was it Sugar said? Beseeching the heavens for favor. That’s it. That’s the island.
And she curses herself. She didn’t even think of how she’d get there. All the other islands seemed connected – bridges and roads are the thread that stitches this crazy archipelago together.
But this island is just… out there. Across the water.
At least a quarter of a mile out.
Even thinking of dipping her toes in that water gives her the shivering fits. As the thought crosses her mind, she thinks of the waters of the Susquehanna – turbid mud stirred by the angry current, voices carried along with it. Bubbles and ghosts and terrible thoughts.
Eleanor Caldecott’s corpse – a finger pressed to dead lips.
Shh.
Miriam presses the heels of her hands against her eyes.
The river was bad. The ocean is worse. A big hungry mouth. With coral for teeth and sharks for tongues. Wanting to swallow her up.
She won’t swim.
Won’t do it.
Can’t do it.
She shudders.
Wait. There–
A shape bobbing in the water past the house.
It’s a kayak. Just past a boat ramp. The paddle floating next to it, tethered there with a dark cord.
She goes to the boat. Takes her knife, cuts the rope holding it to the post next to the ramp. Then she slides down the concrete and–
Don’t get in the water don’t do it just go home fuck this you still have time maybe you can wait and spring a trap and catch him leaving–
But then she sees
her mother. Stab wounds like little bloody mouths opening on her chest. She sees Jerry and his dead bird. She sees Peter and his squirting jugular. And over all of it: Ashley’s leering face. That boomerang smile. Those shiny nickel eyes.
Miriam gets in the boat.
FORTY-FIVE
DARK CROSSING
She sees faces in the water.
Not just tricks of the light, either. Corpse faces. Brined and swollen like tumors. The boat thumps against them.
They’re not real. It’s just the Trespasser.
Dead mouths drift open. Silvery bubbles burst to the surface, carry with them whispers that crawl into her ears like snakes–
Chooser of the slain…
You don’t know what awaits you…
You’re not prepared…
Turn back, go home, give up…
The faces of those she’s killed stare up at her.
Edwin Caldecott’s prim, pursed-lips. The cop, Earl, his tongueless mouth sucking in seawater. Beck Daniels – really, Beck Caldecott – on his face is painted a twin-tailed swallow tattoo, the lines distorted and wings bulging from the bloated, waterlogged flesh. Other faces swim in and out: the Mockingbird Killer, Ingersoll, Harriet, the ATM thug. The faces too of those whose deaths she did not cause but which feel like hers just the same: Del Amico, Ben Hodge, Jack Byrd, Hetta Gale, Steve Lister, the little boy named Austin with his red balloon, a balloon she sees float to the surface like a fishing bobber–
They all tell her the same thing:
You’re not ready for this. You pushed and pushed and pushed.
Eventually something was going to push back.
And then she’s almost there. Almost to the island of the pleading trees with the reaching, desperate branches.
FORTY-SIX
TWO TREE KEY
The kayak bumps against the rocky shore. She curses even the slightest sound and tries carefully to clamber out of the boat – but she’s not used to boats, doesn’t know how it all works. It’s not like getting out of a car. Her foot presses back and suddenly the boat drifts away. Leaving her here. On the island with the two skeleton-hand trees taller than the rest.
She tells herself, I don’t need the boat to do what needs to be done.