The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  But Mother just frowns and keeps dabbing lotion all over.

  Miriam had run back behind the house into the woods. Under a rotten log she’d found a hole and yellow jackets – which always made her think of little jet planes, little evil jet planes like out of one of those cartoons Mother says is for boys only – and she kept hurrying over and shoving things into the hole to stop the yellow jackets from coming out. She was laughing and having fun, watching them try to push past her roadblock of mulch and twigs and fallen ash tree leaves.

  But then suddenly the air was filled with them – and they were all over her and under her shirt and then came the buzz of wings. The dance of little feet. The biting. The stinging.

  The screaming.

  And now here she is.

  “You mess with things you shouldn’t mess with,” Mother says.

  “It was fun.”

  Mother grunts. “There is an apocryphal gospel – the gospel of the Nazarenes – in which Jesus says, ‘Woe unto the crafty who hurt the creatures of God. Woe unto the hunters for they shall become the hunted.’ You think you’re crafty but you’re not. You were the hunter who became the hunted.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t change what you did. Sorry is a poor man’s Band-Aid.” Mother pauses in her ministrations, then sighs. “We’re not going to the carnival tonight.”

  “But Mom!”

  “Shush. You’re going to swell up like a balloon. You look like a mess. I can’t show the other ladies from the church my bee-stung daughter. The evidence of your sin is for you, not for me. You’ll sit at home.”

  Miriam starts to cry. “But tonight’s the last night!”

  “It is what it is, Miriam.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  TWO DAYS LEFT

  Miriam wakes.

  She can hear her own breathing as she swings upside-down from the tamarind tree. It’s a raspy, whistling sound – like wind keening through the broken shutters of an old window. Her nose is full. Her sinuses ache. Opening her eyes is a bitter acid misery.

  Everything hurts.

  Eventually the calendar clicks over and from her vantage point the sun falls from the horizon like a light bulb dropping from its fixture in slow motion. It isn’t long before the air grows hot and the sun’s kiss turns from something pleasurable into something torturous.

  When the sun lights the world she sees it – further down the shoreline sits, of all things, a submarine. Not a real one, like, some huge nuclear Navy sub. But a small thing. Bigger than a rowboat, but not by much. The narco-sub sits painted in blue camo.

  The front is torn open.

  A red, dead hand rests on the torn metal. Gathering flies. One of the transporters. One of the Colombians Tap-Tap said went missing.

  I have to get down.

  Ashley is going to kill Gabby.

  Gabby may already be dead.

  That realization nearly causes her to black out again so strong is the rush of grief and horror. It’s not like she loved Gabby. She’s not sure that what they had was anything at all besides two people crashing together before pulling themselves apart. But it was fun and Gabby was nice and she deserved more than what Miriam gave her.

  Miriam’s legacy of pain.

  The pain is all over her. Swaddling her: a blanket of nettles for a troublesome infant. Her face pounds. Her middle aches. Her ankle feels like it’s a toothpick cracked in half. And whenever she tries to move, the knife in her thigh gives her a mean twinge. If the rest of her leg weren’t numb she’d probably feel fresh blood trickling.

  The knife.

  She has to get the knife.

  She can cut herself down.

  She bends her body at the waist–

  Her whole body is a powder flash of hot pain. Miriam cries out. She lets her body go slack.

  Again. Try again.

  Another hard bend at the waist, and more pain crashes through her – a big rock in a little pond, a train through a pre-school, a 747 into one of the Twin Towers. But this time she reaches up and catches a fistful of her own jeans. It anchors her, lets her stay bent.

  Blood moves around her body, rushing this way and that. Filling spaces it had fled. Leaving spaces it had pooled. Her muscles scream. Her skin tingles like it’s being poked with safety pins.

  Keep going. Move, you crafty bitch.

  She pulls herself further. Hand sliding along the back of her thigh. She bumps the tip of her ring finger into the base of the knife and it’s like flicking a car antenna. A frequency of new pain runs through her, and she thinks, It’s like a Band-Aid, just rip it off fast. She grabs the knife with her fingers and wrenches it free with a splash of blood–

  But her fingers are numb–

  Blood makes a helluva lube–

  The knife drops from her hand.

  The blade sticks in the ground.

  She tries not to sob. Tries not to scream.

  Miriam reaches for it.

  It’s too far.

  Fuck. Fuck!

  She stops struggling for a while. She tries not to weep but it’s too late. The tears come, spilling up toward her brow, dampening her hair. It feels weak. Meager. Crying is for girls, she thinks. You’re no girl. You’re a bad-ass woman. You’re a hunter. A killer. You’re the river breaker. You’re fate’s foe.

  And yet, the tears keep coming.

  Until a shadow falls over her.

  Louis.

  He found her.

  He’s here to save her.

  Of course he is. He always is. He’s always the one standing between her and death – the one keeping her sane, keeping her balanced – and the wave of realization crashes down on her shores: I need Louis to balance me out. I never would’ve killed that boy in Philly if he were around. She holds his arms and he shushes her and tells her it’s going to be OK, and she says, “Oh, God, Louis, please help me–” And she reaches out and he reaches back and his massive hands clasp her arms at the biceps, and they could squeeze her and wrench her arms out of the sockets, but his touch is as gentle as it’s always been.

  “I had a dream about you,” he says, “and so I came.”

  But then she sees something move–

  A yellow jacket crawls from beneath his arm.

  Then a second. And a third. And four more after that.

  Soon his arms are a swarm of them, some alighting into the air before landing again on his skin. Miriam says, “No, no, no, now is not the time, don’t fuck with me, quit fucking with me,” but the Trespasser leans forward and whispers into her ear.

  “You messed up. You weren’t ready. You went off like a gun half-cocked, and now what? Now you’ve lost your shot. And Gabby’s dead. And your mother’s going to die, too. You’ve failed.”

  Miriam screams.

  Her scream echoes out over the water.

  Loud enough, she thinks, to churn the seas. To rip the sun out of the sky and cast in into the water. To tear up the shore. To part the clouds.

  It’s enough. A jolt of adrenalin lights her up like a city skyline and she reaches, reaches – her fingertips tickle the end of the knife.

  –almost–

  –her fingers slide off, finding no purchase–

  –the angle’s all wrong on the knife–

  –goddamnit goddamnit goddamnit–

  Then she falls. Not her body. But her mind. It feels like her brain slips a gear and lurches out of sync and–

  She sees herself. Hanging there. Looking like fresh hell. Like a dirty sock that’s been run through a mud puddle and then a pile of roadkill, then hung up in a tree to dry. She feels little feet beneath her. Feels the taste of worms and sand and fish in her mouth. She tries to move toward herself and the little feet go hop hop hop and then it hits her–

  Oh fuck I’m a fucking bird.

  It worked. Now. Beaten to hell. Beaten down. It worked.

  The bird as Miriam, Miriam as bird, hops forward.

  Hop hop hop.

  To the knife. A l
ittle beak – her beak – thrusts out and taps the knife handle forward, tap tap tap, putting it in reach–

  A sound of rushing wind. Like cars in a mountain tunnel. And then Miriam’s back in her own body. She gasps. Still tastes the sea water, the fish brine, the worm guts. A little gray-and-white plover bird stares up at her and shakes like a dog trying to free itself of rainwater before flying away.

  Her fingers pinch the bottom of the knife.

  She has it.

  I have it!

  Triumph tastes sweet. At least until she again has to bend at the waist – misery throttling her body, bend don’t break – and saw the rope with the blood-wet blade of the small knife.

  The rope frays. Cuts. Miriam drops.

  She lands hard on her shoulder but the ground beneath is soft.

  For a while, she lays on her side. Curling up like a baby in the crib. Her body shudders as if she’s crying but no tears appear.

  Then eventually she sits.

  She looks around: no gun anywhere. And her cell phone is back in the car where she left it.

  Out there, the ocean. The line of black water. Bright at the top with the cresting sun. The hungry water. The consumptive deep.

  She’s going to have to swim.

  I’m going to have to swim.

  She doesn’t have the strength. The water terrifies her. Her muscles will fail out there. The ocean will suck her down. Chew her up. Her and Eleanor Caldecott: bowels for fish, throat for eels, eyes for minnows.

  Then comes a heavy flutter of wings.

  Followed by a piggy grunt.

  A green-eyed cormorant lands by her side. And stares up at her.

  Grunt, grunt, squark.

  Miriam tries to spit at it but she can’t summon any moisture into her mouth. “Go away,” she croaks. “Trespass somewhere else.”

  The cormorant pecks at her knee. Peck, peck, peck.

  Then: footsteps. Splashing in water. Crashing through brush.

  “Miriam?”

  She blinks.

  “Miriam?”

  And that’s when Jerry Wu comes running full steam up the shore.

  FORTY-NINE

  HOBBLE AND LIMP

  The world seems askew, unfixed, like a paper boat tossed about in a river. This feeling is magnified upon getting into Jerry’s rowboat – with Corie the cormorant sitting proudly at the bow, the ugliest mermaid you ever did see – as the water shoves and slaps the little boat along.

  Her legs and feet are still numb. Her skull feels like aquarium glass tapped on by an unruly child: thoom thoom thoom, hello little fish.

  Jerry doesn’t say much. He mostly just stares at her, face a pair of masks fused together: not comedy and tragedy, but confusion and horror.

  Miriam looks back at the shore. Sees the little island with the two reaching, beseeching hands disappearing slowly. The boat motor growls.

  “I need to–” It feels like she’s trying to talk past a wad of bristly hay in her throat. She coughs, and Jerry quickly grabs for a small thermos behind him and hands it over. She opens it, takes a long swig – coffee. Cold. Doesn’t matter. It’s perfect. “I need to get to Key West. A friend is in…” A body bag. “Danger.”

  “Sure, sure, but maybe you oughta get to a hospital first.”

  “No time.” She levels her gaze at him. “How’d you find me?”

  “You really wanna know?”

  “I hate that question because, yes, I–” She breaks into a hard, raspy cough. “I really obviously want to know.”

  “The bird led me here.”

  The cormorant grunts.

  Miriam says nothing but raises an eyebrow.

  “I was getting ready to do some morning fishing. I drove the truck and the boat down to the bay. But then Corie here started… you know, freaking out. Flapping her wings, beating them against the side of the boat. Squawking. Then she flew away and landed on the hood of my truck and I kept trying to wrangle her away, but she kept flying back.”

  “And you were OK with that.”

  “No, I wasn’t. I wanted to get out in the water while the fish were still jumping. Then like that, she flew away. And not toward the water but toward the road. No way was I gonna keep up with her on foot so I got in the truck. She’d fly. I’d follow. I’d lose her – but the highway’s a straight shot so I kept driving and looking and then I’d see her sitting there on top of a Don’t Drink and Drive sign or on somebody’s mailbox. Then, soon as I got close again–” He claps his hands. “She’d take off again.”

  “She led you here.”

  “She led me here. You got it.”

  Holy shit.

  She turns toward the bird. “You’re a good bird.”

  Corie oinks at her. The bird’s beak opens and closes with a clack.

  Jerry says, “I gotta tell you, the last thing I expected to see was you hanging from that tree.”

  “Things didn’t work out.”

  “With your perp?”

  “Yeah. With my perp.”

  “So now what happens?”

  Now he hurts those people who fell in with me. Including you, Jerry. All because I fucked up. All because I took my shot and I missed it.

  FIFTY

  THE MONSTER WE MADE

  Back at the Malibu she tells Jerry that she appreciates his help. She even leans forward and gives him a small, probably unpleasant hug. Her arms don’t quite touch his, don’t quite complete the embrace, but hugging is not a skill she has practiced very often in this life.

  The hug hurts. Literally. Not in the way some people use that word now – literally as figuratively – but literally, actually, honest-to-all-the-gods-and-devils it hurts her body from top to bottom just to give a half-ass hug.

  He tells her to go to the hospital.

  He tells her to call the police.

  She makes all the right noises – mm-hmm, yes, sure, it’ll be fine, right, right. And then she gets in the car and does none of those things.

  From inside the glove box, she fetches her cell. She grabs Gabby’s number and starts to punch it in even as her tires are kicking up pebbles and the car lurches forward like a drunk off a barstool.

  It doesn’t even get to one ring before someone answers.

  “Miriam,” Ashley sings. “That’s such a pretty name.”

  “You leave her alone.”

  “File that one under too late.”

  “Then stay right there. Because I’m coming for you.”

  He laughs. “You came for me once already. How’d that work out for you? I admit, you got away much faster than I expected. But once I was done with your girlfriend here my friends gave me a message – I saw it written in her blood across the bathroom mirror. I saw the words drip together and tell me that you were on your way and that I was to expect a phone call. So I sat by the phone. I felt the familiar tickle, heard their little whisper – and sure enough, ringy-dingy. Here we are.”

  “I’ll find a way to hurt you. To whittle you down like a stick.”

  “You’re on the losing side, Mir. The side of the scrappy underdogs.”

  “The scrappy underdogs always win.”

  “Only in the movies. In the movies, the underdogs pull it out of the fire in the final game. In the movies, the killer’s victim makes it out alive – the final girl who kills the big bad boogeyman. But this isn’t the movies. This is life. And in life, the monsters prevail.”

  She screams into the phone.

  But he’s already ended the call.

  “The girl is expendable,” says a voice. Miriam turns. Her bowels go to ice water. It’s Harriet. Harriet, the grim assassin. An evil little teapot, short and stout, here is her handle, here is Harriet cutting off all your fingers and toes because she wants to prove her dominance over you.

  Miriam knows it’s not her. She tells herself that again and again. It’s not her, it’s not her, it’s not her. But still, she feels her innards loop like a noose at the sight of her. “You’re not real.”

/>   “You should’ve died that day in the Pine Barrens. I gave you a gift. I gave you my gun. Think about it. If you had used it, we wouldn’t be here right now. Gabby would be alive. Your mother would not be next on the chopping block. You have less than two days now, you realize.”

  “I chose life.”

  “You chose complexity.”

  “I chose. You’re always telling me there’s work to do. Well, I choose to do it. I chose that day to put a bullet in your ugly-ass haircut and my life is now my own no matter how you haunt me or mess with my head.”

  Harriet smiles. “Good. Then maybe you’re ready for this. Maybe. Because you didn’t listen to me before. I said you weren’t ready but did you listen? The forces working against you realize the power you have. You’re the penny on the tracks – small, but still able to derail a train.”

  “That’s a myth. The penny just gets squashed.”

  “I prefer my narrative. Though maybe that’s what will happen to you. Maybe you’ll get squashed. Maybe this is all just a trap and I’m not really here to help you. Maybe I’m here to hurt you. Maybe everything I tell you to do has just led you to deeper, wider circles of misery. You’re Dante in Hell. You’re Sisyphus pushing that boulder up and up and up until it falls back again and again and again. Or maybe you’re Prometheus. You stole something precious from the gods, and now they punish you. I’m the eagle pecking out your liver for all of eternity.”

  “Just shut up. I’m tired of hearing you speak.”

  “It’s like I told you. Nature is brutal and grotesque. If you see yourself as a part of nature – as you must, dear Miriam – then you too must be brutal and grotesque if you are to persevere. Once I told you to be docile. Now is not the time to be docile.”

  “I said shut up and go away.”

  “Not without leaving you one last gift.”

  Then Miriam turns–

  Harriet has a gun pointed at her head.

  The gun barrel is a dark eye, unblinking.

  Trigger pull.

  Bang.

  The vision hits Miriam like a bullet to the head.

  HOW GABBY DIES

  Fast forward: she and the other woman are bolting down Duval Street past the drunks and pirates and cruise-ship tourists and the blonde pulls Miriam into an alcove between an art gallery and a Cuban food joint and Miriam starts cursing about those thin-dicked shit-birds, those assholes who think they can saunter into a bar and jam their nickel-sized cocks into whatever coin-slot they want just by using a few half-ass weak-fuck pick-up lines–