by Chuck Wendig
Can’t kill me.
Always come back.
Already, her skull plates are jostling together like tectonic mantles. Even now, her brain is rebuilding itself within her. She will be whole soon. She will continue her hunt. Forever and ever until the hunt is done, the prey is down, the heart has been taken.
The heart.
Something jostles within her.
Her eyes jolt open. Darkness remains, but she sees the bold white of snow above. The skeleton fingers of dead winter trees.
And then her face looms into view. Smiling.
“Hi,” Miriam says. She waves with a waggle of her fingers. Those fingers are dripping with red. In the other hand, Harriet’s own machete dances. “You might be wondering: Why is she still here? What does she think she’s accomplishing?” Miriam sucks air between her teeth. “Well, I had me a hunch. And it’s based on something you said, actually, so thanks for the inspiration. What was it you said? Oh, you said: then I’m going to eat your heart One animal eating the other. No. Wait. The power of the other. Right? So, wouldn’t that be something? If maybe I just reached in here—sorry, I’m not a surgeon, this is pretty messy business because wow who knew there was that many ribs or that much blood!—what if I reached in and grabbed this big meaty red hunk of beef—”
Harriet’s body shakes. She feels Miriam’s fingers deep within her chest. Rooting around like worms in earth. The worms moor around the center of her being, her heart. “Nnnnnnn,” she says, trying to say no.
“What if I just ripped it out—”
And she does. Harriet feels her heart tear free from its home in her chest. It makes a sloppy, wrenching sound—the sound of someone pulling weeds from muddy ground. Miriam holds the heart up. It beats in her hand, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub. Arteries dangle like torn wires.
“And then, what if I took a big ol’ nasty bite—”
Miriam smiles, opening her mouth and:
Chomp. Teeth into the muscle. Sinking deep.
It’s like being hit by lightning. All of Harriet’s body seizes in a paroxysm of pain and electricity. Miriam, her face ghoulish and scarlet, her mouth smeared with heartsblood, takes another bite. And another. She has to work at it. Teeth grinding up the meat of the organ. With each chomp, another lightning strike. And before the last, only a flappy bit of ventricle left, she says some of the same words Harriet said to her once, back in a shack out in the Jersey Pine Barrens: “There we go. A docile little girl.”
“Ppppnnnnhgggh.”
“Carpet noodle, cunt.”
The scavenger finishes her meal.
FIFTY-ONE
THE CROW
Harriet is dead. Her chest is a cratered cavity. The heart sits in Miriam’s belly, heavy as a stone. She urps into her hand. Snow falls on the corpse, and the skin on the body begins to blister and turn black. Then it vacuum-seals to the bones of the little blunt woman, shoomp. The bones stiffen and crack, the cavity in her chest coughing up a cloud of ash like a tired volcano.
That’s how the body remains.
Miriam picks up the rifle and staggers back through the woods to the cabin.
INTERLUDE
ELEANOR’S PROMISE (A REMINDER)
Miriam shivers against the cold. Out beyond the trellis she sees the gray nothing of pounding rain. The smudge of distant trees. Above her head, water filters down through the old vines and the trellis top, forming puddles at her feet.
“I want to see Wren.”
She moves toward the greenhouse. Eleanor Caldecott touches her arm. “It’s through her that I saw you, Miriam. You are a part of her life. You are just one more piece of her wreckage. Because of her, a piece of you will one day go missing.” Eleanor’s voice grows quiet. “We’re not so different, you and I.”
FIFTY-TWO
A PIECE GOES MISSING
The cabin door creaks open.
Miriam steps in, a whorl of snow following behind.
Chaos has taken hold here. The mattress remains on its side, springs jutting. Samantha lies in Louis’s lap, her face empty of life. He sits cross-legged on the floor, against the end of the overturned bed. “Louis,” Miriam says.
He doesn’t answer.
She takes a step forward, and it’s just vibration enough—
His head slumps forward. It’s now she sees the red hole in the side of his temple. A lone fly, defiant of winter’s chill, takes flight.
Miriam stands there shaking. She is not certain how long she stands like this, and whether it can be measured in seconds or minutes or long threads of infinity stretched out on a lathe. She gingerly takes another step forward, her lips pursing and quivering. A voice inside her tells her to stop, just turn around and go, because outside this cabin is the real world and inside it is some kind of nightmare unfolding, some Trespasser-made artifice meant to torment her, to inspire her to some action she has yet to understand.
Gently, she kneels by Louis.
His lips are cold. The skin on his face is tight.
The bullet hole exiting his other temple is small. Like from a low-caliber weapon.
Miriam eases Samantha aside. The woman’s body is stiff, and moving it is difficult. Then she sets her rifle next to the body and curls up into him. She props his arm up around her. She stays there for a time. Tears crawl down her cheeks. She stares at nothing. Louis is cold, not warm. He does not return the embrace when she holds his barrel chest tight and pulls him closer. Louis is dead.
At some point, she crawls away from him and weeps on the floor. The house of cards that is Miriam, that has improbably stood for all this time, collapses. She craves oblivion. She wants to break herself to pieces and throw herself to all the birds in all the world, one molecule of her mind in each, her humanity and her memory of being human gone, cast away, forever forgotten.
A floorboard creaks.
“You did this,” Miriam says.
“Uh-huh,” says Wren. She’s been in the bathroom this whole time.
Slowly, Miriam stands. She feels dead inside. Like there’s nothing left. As she rises, she brings the rifle with her.
Wren has the pistol in her hand.
“Why.”
Wren’s been crying too. “I told you I had something to tell you. I saw Louis. He was one of them, one of the Mercury Men.”
“He has killed before. He has killed for you before. He helped tear down the rotten Caldecott tree, the one in which you were ensnared.”
“I . . . I know, but it’s not like that, it’s not like I can control this. You were gone but then—” Now the girl is crying once more. “But then you were here again, and I knew it wasn’t you, but still, you kept telling me things, like how he was going to kill Samantha, how he was going to just let her die and how if I wanted to take her to a hospital, I had to do something. I had to take care of him—”
Wearily, Miriam seethes: “And how did that work out for you? Did you save Samantha? Is she here with us now?”
“No. I was too late.”
“You were too late. That’s ironic, isn’t it? Too late.”
“I told you it’s not like I’m in control, exactly—”
“You were too late. I told you not to trust how sure you were. I told you not to listen to the Trespasser. I love very little in this world, you fucking little cunt, and Louis was one of those precious things I loved. And now you took him away.”
Miriam points the rifle.
“Miriam. Please. I . . .”
Miriam opens and closes the bolt, loading another bullet. She wets her lips. She still tastes Harriet’s heartsblood on and around her mouth.
“The line from the Bible,” she growls. “Thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Hand for hand and foot for foot. My mother used to say that. She’d say that to remind me that the world worked that way—it demanded grim balance, and I’ve always been an agent of that. I take one life so that another may go. I balance those scales. Now you took a life. A very big, very b
eautiful life. I don’t meet many nice people, but he was one of them. Killing you won’t even begin to balance the scales.”
Wren drops the gun. “I know.”
Miriam’s finger coils around the trigger. “I should have let you drown in the river. Eleanor Caldecott was right about you. She told me, she said you were a bad little girl. That I was part of your wreckage. That you would rob me of something, some important piece. And here we are. Prophecy fulfilled.”
“I know. I fucking know. I know, I know, I know . . .” Her words dissolve into a babbling brook of spit-slick mess. The sound that comes out of her is not a word but the sound of a beaten, cornered animal.
Miriam’s thumb moves to the safety.
And then it turns the safety on.
She throws the rifle to the ground.
Wren seems jarred by it. “No, no, no. You kill me. You need to kill me. You need to—I did this, I did this wrong bad thing and—”
“Shut up.”
And Wren shuts up. Her face pale and awestruck.
“I can’t do it. I can’t kill any more people. I don’t have my owl. I don’t have my Louis. You need to go. Take the car. Drive far the fuck away. Live a life of reparation and repentance. And if you ever cross paths with me, you dire little beast, I will cut out your heart and eat it.”
They stand there for a while. Silently regarding one another.
Then Lauren Martin goes to Samantha’s corpse and fishes the keys out of her pocket before darting out the door. Soon, the engine starts. And the car drives away. Wren has fled the nest.
Now Miriam has to flee too.
PART SIX
* * *
THE NEST
FIFTY-THREE
A PIECE RETURNS
The handcuffs are loose. She expected them to be tight. She’s still bloody. She walked into the station this way, streaked with frozen blood and shivering. The cops put a blanket around her. They took her statement. (Which was, through chattered teeth, I don’t know, fuck you, I guess I killed a lot of people. She named a bunch, including some of Wren’s.) It’s like they don’t know what to make of her. There’s only three cops even here. All of them are now wearing latex gloves in case this blood is diseased. And maybe it is. Who knows?
Who cares?
She sits there at the desk, the handcuffs binding her wrists at the front. The cop pecks and pokes at a computer, occasionally staring at her with worried eyes. This cop’s got a big broad right-angle nose and a boot-brush mustache. The other two cops she thinks of as Fatfront and Fishbowl. Fatfront is a short, big dude whose dick and balls form a kind of deflated-basketball bulge at his crotch. Fishbowl is a woman. Her name, Miriam knows—Sarah Weber. She knows it because Officer Sarah tells her. Weber has the eyes of a goldfish—specifically, the eyes of a goldfish warped and magnified by the curved glass of a shelf-resting fishbowl, or, in this case, a pair of too-big eyeglasses. Those two whisper. She hears the words mental breakdown and cracker factory. They think she’s nuts. Fine. They can send her wherever. Jail. The cuckoo parade. Guantanamo. They can throw her ass in a shallow grave somewhere. She just wants the rest.
She knows how all three of them die, of course. It does not excite her. Bootbrush dies from stomach cancer in twenty-three years. Fishbowl is on a train when it derails, crashing into another train, and she dies in the wreckage. Fatfront chokes on a meatball at a restaurant and nobody helps him.
Bootbrush says to her, “I guess we ought to get you cleaned up and in a cell until we can figure this all out.” He really just thinks she’s crazy.
“Don’t you want this blood as evidence? It’s not mine.”
So, they do that first. But this isn’t a crack forensic team. They take a picture of her sitting there. Then one of them comes over and scrapes some of the blood off into a plastic baggy that they pull not from some high-tech forensics lab but from a galley kitchen adjacent to the main room of the station.
Then shower-time. It’s Fishbowl who takes her back into the showers. Soon as she’s disrobed, Fishbowl gasps. “That blood is yours,” she says.
“Huh?”
Miriam looks.
Oh. Right. The injury. She lifts her arm and the injury reopens, making paint-peeling sounds as the scabs split. She cries out, wincing. They tell her she’s going to have to go to the hospital. While she washes herself (handcuffs still on), they’ll call an ambulance and ugh, Miriam just wants it all over. She just wants to lie down. She just wants to die. Like Louis. Like Bird of Doom. Like everyone I meet because we all die and this is how it is, so why fucking bother.
The soap is a pink color so unnatural, it must be extraterrestrial in origin. It smells like motor oil. She scrubs it everywhere, including into her scabbed-up nose and into the crusty wound under her arm. It burns. It hurts so bad with her probing fingers, she wants to pass out, and she almost does. The pain feels right.
And then as she’s stepping out—
Touching no one or nothing but herself—
Reaching for a towel—
INTERLUDE
THE VISION
From nothing comes something. From the void comes light. From death comes life. The entity sees the aperture, a fontanelle from which it will escape. It does not understand this in a complex way, only in a primitive, primeval, instinctual way. That way is out. This was home, but now it is not. Out is all the entity has, even though it wants desperately to remain here. This place is safe. This place is shelter. To leave it is to be exposed. The light out there is bright and then it is eclipsed—something grabs ahold of the entity, and the fingers are sharp, and then there is blood, and a twisting sound. The entity wants to scream but it cannot: its throat is filling, its body is cinching tight. Pink to blue to black. Choking. The light, crushed. Life, extinguishing bit by bit, crude hands holding it down, slippery and inept, its head buried in soft tissue as the loop around its neck tightens—
FIFTY-FOUR
EMBER AND SPARK
Miriam gasps and falls to her knees. Fishbowl gasps, too, surprised by this, and rushes over to help her up. But Miriam’s legs have gone to noodles. She can barely stand. The cop brings her a chair. “The ambulance will be here soon,” Fishbowl tells her. Miriam nods.
Her eyes shine with tears.
The vision. It hit her like a wave.
(Like a red snow shovel to the back.)
It was a death vision.
But she didn’t touch anyone.
She already saw how these three Keystone Cops die.
Which means—
“I need a phone call,” she bleats.
“What?” Fishbowl asks.
“I get a phone call, and I want it. Now.” She summons something resembling respectfulness. “Please.”
“Sure, sure, hold on.” Fishbowl goes and gets a cordless phone and hands it over to Miriam. Miriam tries to bring spit to her mouth so she can talk, and with trembling fingers she taps out the phone number. Ring, ring, ring.
A bleary Gabby answers.
“Hnnnh,” she says. “Whozit.”
“Gabby.”
A moment of quiet. “Miriam.”
“I need your help.”
“Why? Where are you? What’s wrong?”
Miriam blinks, and tears push themselves out of her eyes and down her cheeks and onto the phone. “Gabby, I’m pregnant. Louis is dead, and I am pregnant with his baby.” And it’s this last part that she can barely say: “And the baby is going to die. I need your help. Please come get me. Please.”
“I’m coming,” Gabby says.
Miriam hangs up the phone and holds it to her forehead like an object of prayer. The future suddenly looms both bright and dark, and she does not know on what side of it she will land.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wrote this book before, during, and just after the 2016 election took place. That should give you a pretty solid sense of exactly how broken my brain was when I wrote this book, but I like to imagine that the seething anxiety and creeping in
somnia added a certain, oh, I dunno, feral edge to it. Just the same, thanks go to Stacie Decker, Joe Monti, and Richard Shealy for helping tame the book in the wild places where such taming was needed.
Thanks to Adam S. Doyle for the astonishing cover artwork.
Thanks to Kevin Hearne for always being a huge advocate of Miriam and this series.
And thanks, as always, to the readers, for staying with this series.
Coming up next, the last of the bunch: Vultures circles in 2019.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHUCK WENDIG is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has also written comics, games, and for film and television. He’s the author of more than twenty novels, including the Miriam Black series, Invasive, Zer0es, and the Star Wars: Aftermath trilogy. He is the cowriter of the short film Pandemic, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, as well as the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus. He currently lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, son, and two dogs. He can be found at terribleminds.com and on Twitter at @ChuckWendig.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SIMONANDSCHUSTER.COM
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Chuck-Wendig
ALSO BY CHUCK WENDIG
THE MIRIAM BLACK SERIES
Blackbirds
Mockingbird
The Cormorant
Thunderbird
STAR WARS: THE AFTERMATH TRILOGY
Star Wars: Aftermath
Star Wars: Life Debt
Star Wars: Empire’s End
Zerøes
Invasive
ATLANTA BURNS SERIES
Atlanta Burns
The Hunt
THE HEARTLAND TRILOGY
Under the Empyrean Sky
Blightborn
The Harvest
NONFICTION