by Chuck Wendig
She winces. “Would it surprise you to learn I haven’t thought that far?”
“It would not.”
“Then let’s go get our girl.”
TWENTY-THREE
BLACK DOG
The two of them creep through the dark of the campground. In the distance, lanterns glow through trees as they hear the dull fuzz of Led Zeppelin coming from the other direction—it’s “Black Dog,” eyes that shine, burning red, the song grinding up and winding back down on itself. Someone hoots. A woman laughs. Then comes the sound of cans clanking against other cans in a trash bin.
Louis turns toward her as they walk through the trees, and says, “The black dog is a portent of death.”
She turns to give him a look, and he keeps walking and talking.
“The Dartmoor Dog. The Barghest. Cerberus. The black dog guards the gates of Hell, Miriam. The Hateful Thing warns us that death is coming, always coming, and if we keep moving forward, as we are doing now, we are entering his realm, the realm of death, the realm of Hell.” And now the words are coming faster and faster, and Louis’s eyes are glowing red, and behind his words grow a thrumming growl and an insectile hum. “You hunt the dog, but the dog hunts you. Death is ahead of you and behind you. Keep stepping, Miriam, but the slope is slippery ahead, slippery with blood and wishes, death and fishes.” And now he’s laughing and she feels all the forest closing in around her, branches pinning her down as Louis stands over her, his jaw cracking and his mouth widening—
And then it’s like a vacu-seal pop in her ears. The sensation is over as fast as it came. Her skin shudders with goosebumps.
“Did you just say something?” she asks.
“Not really, I was just muttering under my breath about those RV assholes.” She gives him a look, which he interprets as confusion and not as what it really is: fear because for half a second, Louis and the Trespasser were one. Or that’s what the Trespasser wanted her to think. “The music is coming from a buncha yokels who bring their fifth-wheels or their RVs and it’s just party time for them. I used to camp with my dad and those guys would always try to ruin it. Keep you up late with music and cigarette smoke.”
She shakes off the bad vibes from the vision, forcing a laugh. “You sound like an old man shaking his cane at the clouds.”
But Miriam can’t ignore the feeling: We’re being pursued. Hunted by something, even as we hunt in turn. The black dog. Death in front and behind . . .
They cut toward a red gravel path. Trees have old wooden signs hung to them with fading numbers painted on. They’re in the 200s, then the 300s, and that means they’re getting close to Wren. They creep along like specters, and Louis points to a tree ahead that has the magic number on it.
454.
The lot is small. Just a postage stamp of dirt and grass, like Louis said it would be. A single tent sits in the center of it. The tent glows with lantern light, and that glow shows them the faint shape of a person in there.
It’s her.
She jerks her finger, indicating he come closer, and when he does, she tells him in a low whisper, “I’ll go up to the tent. You stay out here. If she bolts, you . . . I dunno, catch her.”
“Catch her?”
“Yeah, catch her. Use those big beef-sticks you call arms and scoop her up. We can’t let her get away. This is our one shot.”
He sighs. “All right. Be careful. You don’t know what she’s capable of. If you’re right, this girl has killed people.”
“Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”
Nicely done, killer.
He just backs away and fades into the shadows. Miriam turns toward the tent.
Every part of her tightens up like a hangman’s rope.
She skulks up to the tent, and then—she’s not sure what to do. She can’t knock. There’s not a door. And the flap is zipped shut. The tent itself is grimy, years old, its margins stained with dirt and rain-spatter. It’s staked into ground gone dry since it hasn’t rained in a while. Does she kick over the tent-stakes, trapping Wren inside? Does she crawl under like a fucking snake?
Hell with it. She reaches down, grabs the external zipper, and—
Vvvvvviiiip.
She opens the portal to hell.
And there sits Lauren Martin. Wren. Nearly a mirror image of Miriam. Hair almost the same length. Red streaks that Miriam had in her own ’do once upon a time. The girl sits hunched over, a book in her lap, hair framing her face like the curtains on a stage.
Her head turns. She looks at Miriam, utterly unfazed. Her nose wrinkles a little like she’s detecting a bad smell. Her gaze narrows moments before she rolls her eyes.
“Hey, psycho,” she says. Droll, dull, like she’s irritated. Exasperated. Bored. “You’re early.”
“Early.”
“Yeah, so like, fuck off for a while. I’m not taking requests right now.”
“Requests.”
Wren’s voice spikes. “Yes. I’m reading. Can’t you see?” She waves a paperback book that flops about like a dead bird, making strange shadows on the wall by the light of the Coleman lantern behind her. It’s Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep. “I’m not taking appointments. So, shoo, fuck off, you’re free to go.”
Miriam’s jaw hangs slack. She doesn’t understand.
Until suddenly she does.
“You don’t think I’m real,” she says.
“You’re real fucking annoying, is what you are.”
Miriam flicks her gaze around the small two-person tent. Across from Wren’s feet is a sleeping bag. Near that is a blue steel, small-caliber revolver.
The girl rolls her eyes so aggressively, Miriam’s pretty sure they’re both going to roll out her ear. Then she scoots closer, reaching for the zipper to close the tent.
Miriam catches her wrist.
And that’s the moment.
There’s no vision—Miriam can’t see how the girl is going to die because she saw it once: Lauren Martin was fated to die on the Mockingbird’s table as the killer sung his condemning song and then chopped off her head with a fire ax. A second shot at life yields no such second shot for Miriam’s visions. Once it’s done, it’s done. But while Miriam is afforded no such revelation . . .
Wren’s eyes go wide as she looks to Miriam’s hand on her wrist. She doesn’t even try to pull away. She just stares. Gaping.
“You,” Wren says, breathless.
“It’s me, Wren.”
The girl regards her with wide, fearful eyes. Her gaze settles on the center of Miriam’s chest. “The black mark.”
“What?”
“You’re dead.”
A threat? Or something else?
Miriam’s about to protest—
But the words never make it past her lips. Wren karate-chops Miriam right in the throat. Pain and panic explode like firecrackers inside her as she staggers back, gasping, clutching at her trachea. The tent shakes as Wren launches herself free, gun glinting in her hand. With a clumsy, swiping paw, Miriam grabs for her—but it’s no use. The girl easily evades her grip and dashes toward the trees.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Miriam thinks. She forgot—when she met Wren a few years ago, what was the girl practicing under the tutelage of one of the Mockingbird killers? Self-defense. Go for the eyes, the crotch, and of course, the throat. Finally, she pulls in some air and the white bleeding around the darkness of her vision recedes. She calls out for Louis. But her voice is small and squeaky, the protest of a mouse in the claws of a hawk.
Voices reach her. Louis, yelling. Wren, screaming. Then a gunshot pierces the dark. Miriam’s heart rate is a tent spike in her chest, and she pumps her legs fast as they’ll take her toward the sound—
Louis is there. On the ground. He’s clutching his head.
Shit, no, shit—
She drops to her knees, skidding toward him, and she’s got his head in her hands and she’s looking for the hole, the blood, something, anything. But all he’s doing is clutching his ear, and t
hat’s not bleeding either. Louis says loud, too loud, “She fired the gun. Can’t hear anything. Goddamnit!”
She’s in the wind. I have to find her.
Miriam kisses him on the cheek—a dumb, foolish, instinctual reaction that feels miserably, painfully right—and then launches herself back to her feet.
Lights cut through the dark. Red and blue strobe. Then comes the woop-woop of a warning siren. Police. No, no, no. They’re going to ruin everything. This is too soon. She needed a chance. If they catch Wren, they’ll take her away. And if they don’t catch her, they’ll spook her into running far and fast. Down at the end of the gravel path is a small road, and a cruiser cuts off the path. A shadowy shape darts in front of the car. Wren. Miriam bolts toward it—
A massive arm catches her around the middle. She oofs as the air blasts from her. It’s Louis. He shakes his head. “Cops.”
“I know; let me go!” She punches at him.
“She looks like you. They catch you, it’s all over.”
His voice is calm. His voice does what it often does—and it achieves what so few can achieve. It calms her. His reason infects her like a disease.
Damnit, damnit, damnit.
He points toward a small deer trail. “Come on. This way.”
She curses under her breath and then follows after.
They make a mad dash through the campground. They dart out in front of one path only to end up in the headlights of a cop car. Louis pulls her into the brush, and they hear the pop and slam of a car door. Ahead, flashlight beams spear the dark, sweeping across it. Louis pulls her close, pressing down on the center of her back to keep her low. And then they’re free. Ahead is his truck.
The jangle of keys, the growl of an engine, the spitting-animal snarl of tires kicking up loose stone—and then they’re gone as Louis guns it out of the campground lot. No headlights in pursuit. No red and blue. Just the dark road ahead. And death, Miriam thinks. Always death ahead.
TWENTY-FOUR
HUNGRY LIKE A WOLF
They eat. They have to. It all adds up—Wren, the gunshot, the cops, the escape, it tunes the both of them up so bad that it’s like a fire consuming all their fuel. That leaves them only one recourse: hamburgers.
The pickup sits parked under the crooked red roof of an old drive-up twenty-four-hour burger stand called JJ’s. It’s right off the highway, and from here they can see the late-night traffic whisking past in the distance. Tractor-trailers barrel forward. Sometimes their Jake brakes stutter and judder as traffic changes.
Louis sits on the dropped gate of the pickup bed. Miriam paces the asphalt, slaloming through potholes and fissures as she downs one hamburger after the next. Presently, she’s eating her third, and it’s like she can’t get enough. Like she just wants to unhinge her jaw and swallow the whole burger stand whole. It’s times like these she thinks, I could eat a guy. Like, the Donner Party? She wouldn’t have held out that long. A half-hour into hungertown and she’d be picking up a rock and bludgeoning the fattest, slowest one.
“Fuck!” she says around a mouthful of food. “We had her.”
“I know.”
“Now the cops might have her. Or she’s in the wind.”
“I don’t know which would be better.”
“Her being on her own is better. Trust me.”
Louis leans forward, crumpling up his burger wrapper into a waxy boulder. “I dunno, you said she was killing people. Better she be off the streets, then.”
“All the more reason why she shouldn’t be with the police. They’re going to want to punish her for this.”
“She’s killed people. That’s usually how it works.”
Miriam stops, cheek bulging with barely-chewed burger. “Oh, really? Should I be locked away? How about you? Don’t pretend like we both haven’t done some nasty business. I bristle at self-righteousness.”
He sighs. “You’re right. But what we did was different.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” This isn’t helping. She switches tracks, her mind furious to walk another road. “Wren recognized me, but at the same time, she didn’t.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I think she thinks I wasn’t real. She said I was dead.”
He fishes into a carton, pulling out a wad of fries. “You said you have a Trespasser. Maybe she has one too.” He brushes salt from his hands. “Your Trespasser sometimes looks like me. Maybe her Trespasser looks like you.”
That hits her like a howitzer round to her middle.
“That’s fucking scary,” she says. She remembers what Sugar, another psychic like her, said to her down in the Keys.
Miriam: I have work to do.
Sugar: Is that what the trespassing specter in your head tells you?
Miriam: . . . The Trespasser.
Sugar: That’s what you call it?
Miriam: Yeah. You have one too?
Sugar: I do.
Miriam: What do you call yours?
Sugar: The Ghost.
It’s real. It’s in her. It was in Sugar. And now it’s in Wren. Maybe they each have their own demon. Or maybe there’s just one—and it’s unshakably upon each of them, fast and fixed as a shadow.
Suddenly, everything feels like it hinges on that: the Trespasser. She wants to see him now. Miriam is half-tempted to hold her fists to the sky and try to summon her diabolical companion. Her shadow has been scant of late, and now she thinks even that is the demon playing with her. Plucking her strings. Negging her like a fucking pickup artist. Somewhere in the ether, the Trespasser is flitting about, taunting her: If you don’t want me, then I don’t want you. And that in turn will only make you want me more, you stupid little bitch. . . .
She can almost hear the monster breathing down her neck.
Louis says, “I know it’s not my place, but I want to say, I’m proud of you.”
“Hnnh?” she asks, genuinely incredulous. “Dear god, why?”
He laughs. “You haven’t had a cigarette. You haven’t had a drink. I mean, sure, you ate, like, fifty hamburgers, but even still, you look like you’re in shape. I just—” He stutters, then stops. “It’s nice, is all.”
Part of her wants to scream, Fuck you, dude, I don’t need your approval.
Part of her wants to hiss, Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me right now, because I will gladly take your approval all hot-and-sweaty-like in the back of your truck.
She settles on the middle path: “Thanks.”
He reaches out a hand. She takes it. His grip is firm and yet soft. His hand is so big around hers. They sit there like that for a while. It’s nice.
TWENTY-FIVE
WELL, IT WAS NICE
Eventually, Miriam says, “If I touched your dick right now, would that ruin the moment?”
Louis clears his throat. “I think so.”
They keep holding hands, but now his grip is stiff, and he’s staring out at the highway like he’s trying not to acknowledge her.
“I ruined the moment,” she says.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
TWENTY-SIX
INCHES AWAY
Back to her house. (Though that still seems strange to think. Her house. Whose house? My house.) The truck idles outside the driveway. It’s a diesel, so it chug-chug-chugs as it sits there. The low engine vibrates up through her feet, her legs, into her hips. Deeper still.
Their hands are palm-down on the seat. Her left hand is three inches from his right hand. I borked that all up, she thinks.
“We still need to talk about Samantha,” she says, rattling the feather in its glass vial.
“I know. But not tonight. I’m tired.”
“You could come in. I’m a homeowner now. Hell, I own two houses. It doesn’t get much more respectable than that. I’m basically two adults.”
He laughs. “Don’t you have a houseguest?”
“I do, but I’m pretty sure he’s asleep.” She tried calling Grosky on the way over, and no answer. She’s pretty sure she’s going t
o go right in there and wake his ass up, though, because she needs to know what he knows about what happened tonight. But if Louis comes in, that can wait till morning. . . . “Come on. Whaddya say? It’s either that or some chump-change motel.”
“I am used to having my tractor trailer to sleep in.”
“So, my casa is your casa.”
“I shouldn’t. If I do . . .”
His voice crawls back down his throat before he finishes that sentence, but she knows where the sentiment is going. If I do, who knows where we’ll end up? She knows what will happen. She wants it to happen. She can see in his eyes that he wants it too, unless she’s imagining things. And with that done, they can both put Samantha the Fiancée in her proper place: as a shared enemy suitable for castigation and maybe destruction. But as long as he hangs on to her, Miriam’s not sure what happens next. I need you with me, big guy.
“I’ll see you in the morning?” she asks, suddenly fearful that when the sun comes up, he’ll turn to vapor once more, gone from her life anew.
He nods. “Have a good night, Miriam.”
“Nighty-night, Frankenstein.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE HOUSE OF BLOOD
As she walks up to the house, the fatigue falls on her like a lead blanket. The caffeine that powered her, the adrenaline that pushed her, the hamburgers that fueled her furnace—it’s all over, and the tiredness that results is the kind that winds around her bones like climbing vines, ever tightening, threatening to pull her down to the ground, pull her apart, make her one with the earth in a great big old dirtnap.
She thinks to go and wake Grosky up, but what’s the point? It’s after midnight and she’s exhausted.
It’s time to sleep.
She flings Grosky’s keys down on the table. I totally left his car at the coffee counter, didn’t I? Shit. All the more reason not to wake him up.
Eyelids heavy, she pokes her way up the dark stairs. Creaky wood complains underfoot. Thoughts of Louis and Wren flit through her head like night birds. And Gabby, too. I should really call her.