The Cormorant

by Chuck Wendig

  The woman is fumbling for something–

  The gun! She’s got the gun pointed over the back seat just as Miriam’s feet crack a spider-web in the glass and knock it out of its frame–

  “Stop!” the woman screeches, and Miriam wants to reach up and grab that gun and slap her. But the whole hands-bound thing makes that hard, so she works with what she has, and what she has is her skull.

  Miriam moves her body like she’s a dolphin trying to get back into the ocean and tries to smack the top of her head into the woman’s gun-hand. But she discovers a better opportunity instead – she bites down hard on it. Crunch. The woman shrieks. At the same time, the big guy grabs Miriam by the scruff of the neck–

  INTERLUDE

  NOW

  “Wait wait wait,” Grosky says. “So you do know how we bite it.”

  “Bite it. Is that a pun? Because I bit your scarecrow friend here?” Vills looks down at her own hand and frowns. Miriam hisses, “You’re interrupting my story, and that’s very impolite. You’re rude and unpleasant. Like a soccer mom, or a dog fart.”

  “We already know this part of the story,” Vills says.

  “Apparently not, because Big Boy here has questions. And yes, Agent Grosky, I do know how you both die.”

  “Come on. Give us a taste.”

  “You die by choking on a canned ham – still in the can, actually. So impatient. She chokes, too, but on a horse dick. Awkward! They’re very big. I think her eyes were bigger than her stomach, don’t you?”

  “You little twat, I’m done with–”

  But Miriam turns her volume up to drown out Vills. “No, wait wait wait. I remember now. Grosky, you crush your wife during sex – she explodes like an overcooked sausage, it’s totally gross – and the guilt drives you to take your own life. And Vills, you fuck a nasty old zoo chimpanzee and get some kind of zoo-born chimp-flu that covers you in canker sores–”

  Vills slams both palms down on the table. “See? This is what we get, Richie. This is what you want to stick around for. We have to go.”

  Grosky levels his gaze at Miriam. “Tell me how we die.”

  Miriam winks. “That’d be cheating. Don’t you like surprises?”

  FIFTY-SIX

  LEAP BEFORE YOU LOOK

  Vills screams and yanks her hand away. The gun drops. Miriam gets her feet under her, wrenches her head free of the big guy’s meaty grip–

  Then she uses her legs to push her body up and out of the busted backseat window–

  –right into traffic.

  She lands hard on her shoulder – oof! – just as a big-ass cherry-red pickup blasts past so close she can feel the tires’ wind on her hair.

  Not gonna die, not gonna die, not gonna die.

  She’s in the middle of a highway. Four lanes.

  At the far side, a guardrail.

  And over that guardrail–

  A drop to another highway. The turnpike, she thinks. Crossing like two ribbons atop a Christmas present.

  Miriam sprints across the highway. Cars don’t stop. Drivers don’t give one shit, two shits, a hundred shits – they’ve got places to go and, by golly, this is Florida, where stuff like this must happen all the time. A motorcycle nearly takes her boot off. A white sports car almost cuts her in half.

  But then – wham, she slams into the guardrail.

  She turns around. Faces the gray car. The woman is already out. Gun back in her hand.

  Miriam starts sawing the zip-ties back and forth on the ragged, almost serrated edge of the guardrail. Back and forth. Cutting into her hand.

  The woman aims the pistol.

  The big guy is half out of the car, yelling, “Don’t shoot! This isn’t on the books. Don’t shoot her, goddamnit–”

  Miriam winces, keeps sawing, feels blood crawling down the sides of her palms.

  The woman hesitates pulling the trigger.

  A grungy gray box truck blasting booming Reggaeton music charges past.

  She fumbles with the gun.

  Both halves of the zip-cuff come free.

  Miriam looks down over the highway’s edge.

  Here’s my chance.

  And she jumps.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  CRYSTAL BLUE PERSUASION

  Boom. She cracks hard into an empty swimming pool carried on the back of a flat-bed trailer – a stack of swimming pools, actually, three piled atop one another and held to the truck with wide white straps. The horse-kick of pain transitions swiftly to a dull roar of misery throughout her body.

  She gasps, lying on her back. Arms spread out, cruciform.

  I really wish the pool had been filled with water first.

  Still. Nothing seems broken. Moving her limbs hurts like a sonofabitch – and yet, they move. Nothing falls off. All her organs remain firmly ensconced inside her body.

  She’s going to have a helluva bruise, though.

  It’ll match all the others.

  This truck heads southbound on the turnpike. Opposite to the direction she had been going in the car with those two so-called Feds.

  That means she has to get off this truck. Right? She has to get back to her mother’s, has to stand in Ashley’s way, has to get the Malibu–

  But then she thinks, fate is a river with dark, fast-moving waters. That’s what she hates about it. The inevitability of it. The illusion of choice – paddle left, paddle right, the rapids will still carry you where they want to carry you. She feels a spike of pride that she’s the riverbreaker, a big stone that parts the waters, that changes the course of the river, that turns one straight line into two divergent ones.

  Today, though, she doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

  Today, fate is not her foe – it is her friend.

  Why fight it? She’s seen the future. She knows where fate takes her.

  It puts her on a boat. With Ashley Gaynes. And her mother.

  Her mother, who’s probably already gone. Ashley’s taken her already. Miriam feels it like a steel wire threading through her marrow: a grim certainty that she’ll go back to the house and find no one there. And he’ll taunt her with it. He’ll leave a note. Or call her. Something to remind her that she’s always one step behind – a little boy chasing a red balloon right into path of an oncoming SUV.

  Fuck that. Instead of fighting it, she’s going to go with it.

  Fate is like gravity. If she lets herself go, it’ll always pull her down.

  She’ll go all the way to the bottom. Right to the boat. Right to the moment that it matters. She wanted to avoid that, but she’s been struggling against it to no avail. The bottom is where she belongs.

  The end is where she lives. And she’s learned so much along the way.

  Southbound it is, then.

  Mile zero, motherfucker.

  Besides, she’s tired. Really goddamn tired. All parts of her feel weighed down – a corpse dragged to the ocean floor by heavy chains.

  She curls up in the scalloped edge of the pool. Wads herself up in a fetal ball. Miriam sleeps. And for once, she does not dream.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  PREDESTINATION

  Coming down off the long side of a bridge, the driver hits the brakes to slow the truck. The jake brake grinds and stutters – gung gung GUNG GUNG – and jolts her out of the deathlike sleep that embraced her. It gets her blood hot, her heart pumping. She peeks up over the lip of the pool–

  And sees evening settling in over the smooth crystalline bay. Islands – keys – in the distance. Beneath the truck is the Seven-Mile-Bridge, the massive white whale with the bowed back that connects Marathon with Bahia Honda by hopscotching Pigeon Key.

  Birds sit along the power lines stretched out over the water. Cormorants. Reclining in the fading light of day. Out beyond is the old defunct bridge – a trestle of rusted bones that looks like it might collapse if even one of those birds decides to land on it.

  Perhaps tellingly, no birds land on it.

  The truck comes off the bridge and
slows as it continues down the last straightaway. It grinds and turns wide toward a pebble-gravel entrance with a sign out front: SMUGGLER’S COVE RV PARK AND RESORT.

  The hydraulics squeak and hiss.

  And the truck stops.

  Fate has brought her back to the Keys.

  Now to see what else it has in store.

  She grabs the lip of the pool, swings over the edge – her body cries out as she does so, her teeth reflexively gritting to bite back the pain. She uses the other stacked pools like a ladder and drops into the lot. More vibration. More pain. It rises up through her feet. She suppresses a yelp.

  The “resort” is no such thing – it’s an agglomeration of campers and RVs hitched to posts and racks. Folks are milling about their respective vehicles, grilling hot dogs and BBQ chicken on little charcoal hibachis. Doves and blackbirds strut around the ground, pecking for leftovers.

  A girl in a tie-dyed half shirt sees Miriam and walks gingerly toward her, bare feet padding on the loose pebbles. She’s got a cigarette pinched in the scissors of her thin little fingers.

  The freckle-faced girl comes up, says, “You Miriam?”

  “What of it?”

  “Guy named Ashley’s got a message for you.”

  “Does he now? What message?”

  “Says he’s…” She takes a moment, as if to remember. “He’s surprised you’re pushing it this far. Says you still got some surprises in you yet.”

  The girl takes a hit off the cigarette. Miriam wants one and pulls out her own pack – and before she even plucks a finger in, the girl says, “He said you’d be out and that I wasn’t to give you one of mine. But I’m out too, so I guess it don’t much matter. I got some Hubba Bubba gum, though.”

  “I don’t want the gum. Just make with the rest of the message.”

  “He told me to collect some things from you. Your boots. Your knife. Your sunglasses. Your phone, too.”

  “I’m not giving you those things.”

  “He said you’d say that. He told me to ask what you think Eleanor would say to that.”

  Miriam’s hands tighten to fast fists. “Eleanor?”

  “Sorry. Meant Evelyn.” But the way the girl’s smiling, Miriam thinks the slip-up was intentional. The girl’s not an actor. She’s barely legal; this little minnow can hardly keep it together. Ashley told her to say all this. “You gonna give it over or what? Billy’s got brats on the grill and Boone’s Farm in the bucket so I gotta get back.”

  Miriam licks her lips. Starts removing the requested items one by one. Unlace the boots. Pull out the knife – still rusty with her blood. Fish her aviators out of her pocket – not sure why he wants those. Maybe he thinks she’ll break a lens and use it to cut his throat. (She makes a mental note at that. Attacking people with nearby objects is becoming a fast favorite.)

  Finally, the phone.

  As she goes to hand that over, it rings.

  “That’s him,” Freckles says.

  Miriam answers it. She doesn’t say anything.

  “You’re going along with this easier than I thought,” he says. “It’s like you don’t want to play anymore.”

  “I don’t. I want to finish this.”

  “You’re pushing it all the way. I respect that. Cutting right to the end. Realizing that you have no power here is admirable. Brave, even. When I was a kid my mother used to take me to these air shows, and I loved it when the stunt pilots would dive toward the ground–”

  “Spare me the fucking storytelling and get on with it. You want me on that boat. I want to be on that boat. Tell me how.”

  He laughs. “What if I told you no?”

  “You won’t.”

  “I don’t like your attitude anymore.”

  Then he hangs up.

  “Shit!” Miriam yells, and eyes turn toward her. She hits redial on the phone, and it rings and rings. He’s just fucking with me. He’ll call back. He needs this just as much as I do.

  Freckles just stands there. Miriam didn’t even notice the girl shoving a piece of gum in her mouth. The gum crackles and pops. She blows a big cartoony-balloony bubble. Miriam pops it with a spear-thrust of her pinkie.

  “Hey!” the girl protests.

  “Fuck it,” Miriam says. “He calls back, tell him I’m done. Tell him he wants to kill my mother, he’s going to have to do it without me. Tell him that I don’t even like her. Fuck fate. Fuck the river! And fuck you, too, you vapid little malignancy.” She flips the phone toward the girl, who barely manages to juggle-catch it.

  Then Miriam turns and walks.

  She heads to the highway.

  The sun sets.

  Evening bleeds.

  She walks.

  FIFTY-NINE

  AT LENGTH DID CROSS AN ALBATROSS

  Midnight: Miriam’s hour.

  After the RV park, Miriam walked south, past Bahia Honda beach, past the bend toward Pine Key, where she found the glowing lights of the tiki bar sitting outside yet another marina – the narrow masts of dozens of boats sitting out there like the wooden crosses of old, poor graveyards. She really wondered what it meant. Had she broken the yoke of fate? Or was she just slowing her descent – the stunt plane that Ashley was talking about still heading toward the hard and unforgiving earth, this time at a gentler (if still deadly) decline?

  Now she sits barefoot at the tiki bar, thinking she really should have gotten her shoes and her knife back.

  The bartender – a flabby black guy with man-tits poking their peaks against the inside of a hot pink T-shirt – asks her what she wants, and she says she doesn’t care, doesn’t care at all, but make it big and set it on fire.

  She waits. Looks around. Fish nets hang from the ceiling with a bunch of one-dollar bills caught like little minnows. A few old salts mill around the back. A pair of girls sip from one giant fishbowl – which looks like it’s full of Windex – quietly in the corner.

  He brings her something called an Ancient Mariner. It’s in a tiki glass – big ceramic mug looks like an angry Hawaiian god with a mouth made of lightning and eyes like church windows.

  The bartender clicks a long-necked lighter.

  The drink combusts.

  Flame ripples. Blue blazes.

  She blows it out and takes a sip. Rum and allspice and citrus and it’s smooth and warm and would usually be good but beyond the heat it tastes like ash and vinegar in her mouth.

  Mostly, she just lets it sit there. She idly smears streaks in the condensation collecting on the tiki’s face. Her sunburn hurts. Her leg hurts – where someone tried to saw it off, where another someone stuck her with her own knife. Her back hurts – where she probably has a bruise the size of a trashcan lid. Pain everywhere. Face. Ankle. Chest. Neck. Mind. Soul.

  She goes to take another drink but then sets the tiki down instead.

  Because someone sits down next to her.

  She knows who it is.

  Ashley asks, “You gonna drink that drink–”

  She finishes it for him. “Or is this just foreplay. I know you love the classics but seriously, get a new line. It’s tired. I’m tired.”

  “I need you on that boat,” he says. His voice is like a piece of wood cut against the grain with a dull saw. Splintered and bristly. “I need to show you.” He licks his lips. “I need to make you hurt.”

  “You’ve already made me hurt. Isn’t that enough?”

  He doesn’t say anything but the answer is clear: no.

  Ashley showing up is not a surprise.

  What he does next is.

  He sighs. “I knew you’d say no. That’s the thing. That’s my curse. I called it a gift but sometimes it really is a curse because I know what people are going to do before they do it and that–” Here his voice gets low and growly, and he speaks through gritted teeth. “And that burns me. I wish I didn’t have to make people do things. I’d like to be surprised for once.”

  He drops a little snack baggy on the bar top.

  Two round, wrinkly
skin-colored orbs sit within the plastic.

  Miriam feels her guts lurch.

  No.

  “Those are Evelyn’s toes,” Ashley says. “Just her pinky toes. I thought it better to start there. I’m going to whittle her away if you don’t come with me. I’ve got these two toes. Then I’ll take the rest. Then more of the leg. To the knee. Above the knee. Mid-thigh. To the hip. Then I’ll start on the other leg. Then the fingers, hands, arms, to the face. Ears, nose–”

  Miriam moves fast.

  She palms the tiki glass and smashes it against his head.

  Or tries to.

  Even as she’s grabbing the glass, he’s kicking out with his fake leg. The stool beneath her goes out from under her and she falls.

  The tiki glass drops from her hand.

  Ashley catches it.

  And smashes it against her head just as she tries to stand.

  She reaches out for the stool, tries to pull herself up. People are yelling. Ashley is laughing – a loud, theatrical laugh. Then he’s got a pistol in his hand and the air is full of gunshots and screaming. Miriam holds her ears, tries to scramble to the door, but his hand grabs the back of her head and lifts it up. He thrusts the gun under her chin.

  “No more of this,” he growls. “You come with me, or your mother will be delivered to you in slivers of lunchmeat.”

  He drops her hair.

  Then hobbles toward the door.

  On his way out, one of the girls crawls over the body of her dead friend. She cowers as he passes. He puts a round through the top of her skull. Her brains evacuate through a lower jaw that is no longer there.

  Then he’s gone.

  Miriam stifles a sob. Then she crawls to a stand.

  And follows him out the door.

  SIXTY

  THERE PASSED A WEARY TIME

  Ashley sets up a chair for her inside the boat’s cabin. Then he sits across from her on a small captain’s stool.

  Behind him, flies orbit the bodies of the boat’s original owners. A couple Ashley introduces as “Bob Taylor and his mistress, Carla Pilotti.” They lie, supine, bodies cocked halfway down the steps toward the below-deck cabin, a black puckered crater in the center of each forehead.