The Raptor & the Wren

by Chuck Wendig

  Wren’s a puppet. Is Miriam a puppet, too?

  “I think it’s time for bed,” Miriam says.

  “Agreed,” Louis says, his voice dry and growly. “You two take the bed, I’ll crash out on the chair.”

  Wren says nothing to that, no thank you, no anything. She tears her stare away from him and looks to Miriam. “She’s mad at you, you know.”

  “She who?”

  “She you. Your Trespasser. Your doppelganger specter. First, she told me you were dead. She said you were shot and you wandered out into the desert and died out there.”

  A chill spider-walks its way up Miriam’s spine. Because that is, for the most part, exactly what the fuck happened. She did get shot. She did end up in the desert. But she didn’t die there. Or did I? Dead or no, how does Wren know? How did this Trespasser know? Is this Trespasser truly different, or do she and Wren share the same haunted head?

  “But when I found out she wasn’t you,” Wren says in a low register, “she got mad. Fucking spitting pissed. She said you abandoned her. You wanted out of your job and that’s where I came in. That if you weren’t going to do it, then I’d be the one to fill your boots.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  Wren sneers. “You’re not my fucking therapist.”

  “Fair point, but don’t be pissed at me.”

  Now her voice is getting louder: “Why shouldn’t I be? It’s like I told that thing in my head: you abandoned me. You fucked off on your next adventure, and you left me holding an armload of heavy-ass emotional baggage. You ever think about me? Out there with all this in my head?”

  “Fuck you,” Miriam says, suddenly seething. “I’m not your mother. I figured your life was a whole lot better without me in it.”

  “How’d that turn out, you figure?”

  “Eat shit, you little brat. Your little pre-crime killing spree has left the cops coming after my ass. I could turn and point them toward you, you know. Or even better, throw you to a different set of much nastier, much more rabid wolves: the criminals you keep killing. There’s one nasty little bulldog out there who wants to chew me apart for what you’re doing. So, don’t come laying this at my door like I’m the one obligated.” All this comes pouring out of her mouth, but even as she’s saying it, she’s not sure she believes it. Debt hangs around her neck like a dead bird. She did abandon Wren. She just let her go like a paper boat in the ocean.

  Fuck fuck fuck.

  Wren’s about to lay in deeper, but Louis steps in, separates them. “Hey. It’s late. We’re all tired. Let’s just hit the hay, see what tomorrow brings.”

  That is a question that suddenly haunts Miriam. The question of tomorrow is a scary one. She didn’t think about any of this. They’ve gone and gotten Wren—what happens now?

  But the big dude is right. Now isn’t the time.

  That is Future Miriam’s problem.

  Present Miriam is worn out like a decades-old pair of panties—elastic blown out, moth-eaten, left on the floor to be forgotten.

  And with that, they each go to their corner. Nobody changes into pajamas. Miriam barely has the presence of mind to kick off her boots. Sleep hits them quickly, a vicious duck-duck-goose game dropping each of them into their own dreamscapes and nightmarelands.

  FORTY-ONE

  THE LAST SMOKE

  Wuzza.

  Wooza.

  Snnnrrgh.

  Blink, blink.

  Voices intrude—hot pins popping the slumber bubble in which Miriam has found herself. Last night, she did not go to sleep so much as she was shoved into sleep’s burlap sack and stolen away to the Comatose Kingdom. Climbing back out of that lovely, lightless realm is hard, like escaping a slick-walled pit. When she does, the voices reach a fever pitch and then her heart jumps as she hears a truck door slam.

  She smacks her lips together, tasting the copper tang of dry spit in her mouth as she hauls herself up to the window the same way someone might dangle from a steep cliff—fingers on the ledge, barely pulling her chin up over it.

  Outside, she sees Gordy in his truck. He’s got his window down and he looks pissed. Louis stands there, arms crossed, looking half defensive and half apologetic. Then Gordy rolls up his window and the tires spin gravel as he hauls ass out of there.

  Miriam spies Wren at the edge of the drive, near the trees. She’s got her ragged coat—a grape-purple winter jacket that’s been patched to hell and back—pulled tight around her.

  She’s smoking a cigarette.

  Just looking at her is like looking at her old self, and it brings a new tidal wave of desire crashing down on her. For just a moment, Miriam imagines herself frolicking giddily in a sun-warmed tobacco field as she plucks cancer stick after cancer stick from each bush she passes. One in the gap between each finger, all lit, all in her mouth—she plays each handful of cigarettes like a carcinogenic harmonica. The imaginary relief floods her, and then vacates her immediately because it’s fucking imaginary. When it does, it leaves only hate in its wake.

  How dare that little brat smoke. I didn’t give her that cigarette.

  Miriam doesn’t bother putting on a jacket, and she only barely stuffs her feet into her Doc Martens—the left heel lives outside the boot even as she heads through the door. She stalks through the remaining snow with an uneven gait, heading right to Wren.

  She gets there and with a quick slap swats the cigarette out of her mouth. It hits snow with a tsssss.

  “Bitch!” Wren says. “That was my last smoke.”

  “Good. Smoking is bad for you.” It sounds completely bonkers coming out of her mouth. It’s like wearing someone else’s wedding dress. Those were not my words I sound like someone’s mother. Ugh fuck shit ugh.

  “I got lucky and found it in my pocket and you fucked it up.”

  “I fuck everything up. Get used to it.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah! No kidding.”

  The two of them stare at each other, their breath huffing out in plumes. Louis walks up, boots crunching.

  “You two done?” he asks.

  Their only answer is mopey silence.

  Miriam still smells the cigarette smoke in the air. It’s been a while since she’s had a good proper nic fit, and this one’s like a dug-in tick. Makes all parts of her feel queasy, uneven, stretched thin. One cigarette would fix anything. And a shot of bourbon. And a cup of coffee. And touching someone and seeing how they die by heart attack, car crash, the whirring tines of an out-of-control farm combine, autoerotic asphyxiation . . . nnngh. Finally, Miriam shakes it off and says, “What was Gordy’s deal? He looked peeved.”

  “He saw her.” Louis gestures to Wren.

  “So?”

  “We came in last night late, he saw our headlights, and so he came to check on us this morning—and now he sees her. You and me picking up some teen girl. Who of course just stood off to the side, smoking and looking pissed off at us.”

  Wren shrugs. “Whatever.”

  “You told him she was, like, my sister or some shit, right?” Miriam asks.

  “I didn’t really say anything.”

  Damnit. Miriam rolls her eyes. “You have to get better at lying to rubes, dude. Gordy’s gonna think this is pretty weird. We’re hiding out up here and bringing some teen girl to our little cabin compound? We look like a couple of perverts, like she’s our little sex slave.”

  “Ew,” Wren says. “That’s not what you want from me, is it?”

  “Shut up, no.”

  Louis says, “It’ll be fine. Gordy just didn’t know she’d be part of the deal. He’s a friend. He’s not going to call the cops or anything.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Fine.” But Miriam’s not so certain. She feels like forces are aligning against her, and she can’t see their measure.

  She needs to clear her head.

  “You,” she says, pointing to Wren. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?�
�

  “Hunting.”

  FORTY-TWO

  THE HUNT

  Above them, the owl crosses from tree to tree, tightening the morning sky in a zigzag stitch. The snow has gone from the trees, leaving them looking like skeletal hands thrust up out of Hell, stretched toward a Heaven that sits forever out of reach.

  Beneath, Miriam and Wren walk.

  “You and Louis,” Wren says.

  “Me and Louis what?”

  “You guys been together the whole time, huh?”

  Their feet crunch on snow. “No. I . . . We left each other for a time. I was with someone else. A woman named Gabby.”

  “Bi is all the rage now.”

  “I don’t do it because it’s all the rage; I do it because I do it.”

  “Where’s the chick now?”

  Miriam sighs. “She’s . . . off living her life. I hope. I dunno.” A sudden arrow cuts through her middle—an intense desire to see Gabby again manifests inside her like an old injury torn asunder, a hemorrhage of sorts. The blood of love and longing fills her up and seems to weigh her down. “We parted ways because I’m no good for her.” Even though she’s perfect for me.

  “But Louis, you’re good for him?”

  “I’m . . . not, no, but he’s here anyway.”

  They walk for a while. Wren seems on the edge of saying something else, when a shadow passes over them, a shadow deeper than the night. It’s the owl. It’s Bird of Doom.

  “What’s the deal with the fuckin’ owl?” Wren asks.

  “Who? Bird of Doom? I control her.” But it feels crass to put it that way. Like it’s a disservice to the bird. Miriam suddenly draws that line in herself: I don’t care about disrespecting people, but I care about disrespecting birds. Huh. She tries to course-correct: “No. Okay. It’s not control. Not exactly. I ride her. My mind in hers. I’d like to do it better. I’d like to be able to . . . share both bodies. Me and the bird’s. But I can’t do it.” Not yet, a little voice says.

  “Ooooookay.”

  “And it’s not just the owl. I can do it with other birds.”

  “I know. I saw.”

  “Saw what?”

  Wren tells her about the birds that came to her on top of the mountain. Songbirds, ravens, owls, hawks. Miriam feels her pulse quicken; panic crawls through her like ants through their tunnels. I don’t remember that. That terrifies her more than anything. That she was out there, broken into pieces, each splinter of her stuck in the mind of a bird. One broken cookie . . .

  At least, even unaware, she got the job done.

  Yay me, she thinks drearily.

  “I didn’t know you could do that,” Wren says. “Any of it.”

  “When I met you, I didn’t know either. I first learned I could do it there, at the Caldecotts’ estate. I found myself looking at myself from inside the body of a raven.” And it subsequently tore out the tongue of one of the Mockingbird killers. Some nights, she can still recall, instinctively, the raw, ripping feeling of the tongue being unmoored from its roots inside the man’s mouth.

  “Why birds?”

  “Fuck if I know.” She sighs. “I’m told that birds are soul-carriers. Psychopomps.”

  “Well, you are a psycho.”

  “God, you’re a jerk.”

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  Wren gives her the finger. Miriam gives it back.

  They keep walking. Ahead, a fallen tree sits broken over a massive flat boulder—a rock Miriam thinks of as an altar, as it looks almost sacrificial.

  Above, the owl lands on a branch. Something drifts across Bird of Doom’s awareness, and so too does it reach Miriam—a vibration in the air, a scuttle of little feet on snow, a dark shape darting. Fifty yards out, a chipmunk.

  Not now, Miriam thinks. We’ll find bigger prey.

  “Lemme ask you something,” she says to Wren.

  “Ugh, fine.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “What?”

  “Killing people.”

  “I dunno.” Her voice is cold and flat when she says it.

  “Sometimes, it fucks with me. Other times, I don’t feel it all.”

  “I never really feel it.”

  “And that doesn’t bother you?”

  Wren stops walking. She stares at her feet. “It does. Because it’s almost like it’s not me. It’s like I’m . . .” Her hands circle like she’s trying to pull words and ideas out of the air. “Like I’m the knife. When I killed Bob Bender, I held the knife, right? But it’s like something else was holding me.”

  “Like you’re a tool.”

  “Yeah. A tool.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “That’s the part I don’t like. It’s not the killing. I mean, I don’t like that part, but that part feels like it’s happening to someone else. Like it’s in a movie I’m watching. The part I feel is the part where I lose myself to it. I don’t feel like it’s me, and I know it. I’m, like, aware of it.”

  It’s never been exactly that for Miriam. She’s always felt in control. Hearing Wren talk, she almost wishes she wasn’t in control, because how perfect would it be to have someone else to blame for her actions? Then again, it seems to be bothering the girl. And why wouldn’t it? Miriam’s always felt like she’s had her hands around fate’s throat. Wren, though, feels more a cog: a gear turning in a machine too large to understand. Maybe I don’t understand it either.

  “You ever think you’re wrong?” Miriam asks.

  “ ’Bout what?”

  “Oh, I dunno, the fucking killing people thing?”

  Now Wren’s posture changes. “Do you ever feel wrong?”

  “I have. And do. But at least I actually see what’s coming.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that when I touch the victim, I see how they’re going to die. I see if their heart explodes or if an ice cream truck runs over their head—that really happened, by the way; guy named Zack, midtwenties, he was high on meth and wanted ice cream and then fell down as the ice cream truck drove away. Died from diabetic complications in the hospital. Whatever. I see what happens before it happens. I see if they’re sick, if they fall down, I see if they’re murdered. I live it with them. Through them. I sometimes see the face of the killer. You don’t see anything. You don’t get a beacon, a warning. You just . . . act.”

  “I see the outline. I see the Silver Lining.”

  “You see a hint of what’s coming. That they’re a killer—”

  “A murderer.”

  “Do you know that?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know they are murderers and not, say, a drunk driver? Or a cop who has to kill in the line of duty? Or a soldier?”

  Wren’s face twists up as she yells: “I know what they are! I know who they are. Even if I don’t know the specifics, I know.”

  “Do you investigate? Bob Bender, okay. Pantsless with a stun gun—safe to say you were right. Mark Daley, I found his secret photo stash.”

  “What stash?” Wren’s eyes narrow. Miriam tells her. The basement. The box. The photos. “See? Killer.”

  “But you didn’t know that. How about the others? The dealers and drug-runners, fine, safe bet. What about Danny Stinson? Or Harley Jacobs? Or Sims, Wayland Sims? Were they really going to be killers?”

  “I . . .” Wren backpedals a few steps, feeling her pockets, no doubt for cigarettes that aren’t there. “Stinson was a scumbag. An old thief. Ran a pawn shop and I think he’d killed people before. Sims picked me up when I was hitchhiking and I saw the Silver Lining, and he . . . he was going to kill me; he took me back to his trailer down near Maker’s Bell and he had me in his garage and came at me with a hammer—”

  Miriam remembers what Grosky told her: Wren dispatched him with a barbecue fork. Just as Miriam killed the gunman in the store at the Jersey Shore.

  “Jacobs, I don’t know. I don’t know about her. Sh
e had the glow. She was a drunk. Shitty marriage. I saw her at a bar and I had a gun, a gun I took from Stinson’s pawn shop, and . . .”

  Miriam knows. She shot her.

  It’s hitting the girl now. Maybe she was protected from it before. Or maybe that was just an act. Either way, her shoulders shake. Her eyes glisten as she cops a faraway stare, looking off at nothing—and maybe seeing everything.

  This is a moment of crisis. The waves are coming in fast and heavy. Her seawall is starting to crack.

  Miriam knows she could let it go. And it would stay cracked but together. Or she could try to mend it—making soft, reassuring sounds while gently applying a generous swaddling of emotional duct tape.

  Or she could do the other thing.

  And Miriam, she’s good at doing the other thing.

  She keeps at it: “Maybe that woman, Harley Jacobs, could be she was going to kill her husband. Maybe her husband came home every day, would beat her ass because dinner wasn’t ready, or because she wouldn’t get down on her knees and suck him off, or just because she looked at him funny. That’s murder, her killing him for that. But it’s the kind of murder that’s different from other kinds. It’s the kind I can get behind. The kind I’d help her commit if I had half a chance. But your Silver Lining, maybe it wouldn’t show you that. Maybe your Trespasser is a liar, like mine is. Maybe you are a tool—a gun in a very bad hand.”

  And it shatters. Wren gasps, a gulping, wracking sob. She drops to her knees and buries her hand in her face. Then she falls farther, like a star collapsing in on itself: head down against her knees, arms folded up behind her head. She’s small now, like a piece of furniture, and she just sits there, shaking and weeping.

  Miriam feels the owl’s impatience. A new target has entered play, and Miriam lets Bird of Doom go and find her prey. Wren stays collapsed like that while the owl goes off. Wren shakes and cries. Miriam lets her.

  Soon, Wren’s wracking sobs have dissolved to a slow, simmering grief. As she stands, Miriam shows her a dead rabbit—intact except for a few talon holes. The owl brought it while the girl was on the cold ground, crying. Miriam says to Wren, “Come on. Let’s go eat some breakfast.”