Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

  Harriet decides to check upstairs.

  Halfway up the carpeted steps, she smells it.

  Decay.

  Real, this time. Not metaphorical.

  She calls to Frankie. Like dogs, they sniff around.

  Master bathroom, second floor.

  The shower curtain is closed. The toilet seat is down. A little glass pipe, its bulb end darkened with carbon, sits atop it. The stink is terrible in here.

  "Fuck. He's dead," Frankie says, mumbling behind the arm he's got pressed to his mouth and nose. Harriet doesn't bother. The smell doesn't disturb her. Not like the smell of cut grass. Or potpourri. Or a roast in the oven. "Stupid prick got into the product and fucking ODed. Holy shit."

  Behind the shower curtain, a shadow. Harriet pulls it back.

  A body lies in the tub. Plastic bag over the head. Dried blood clinging to the inside of the bag at the back of the head.

  Frankie blinks. "Someone killed Gaynes."

  "It's not him," Harriet says. "It's Dan Stine."

  "How do you – ?"

  "I just know." She holds her breath, then tugs the bag off the head. The back of the head is a ruined mess. "Gaynes hit him with something. A pipe, a bat, a crowbar. I didn't see any blood, but I bet you'll find it downstairs. Or outside. But the hit didn't finish the job. Hence, the bag. While Stine was down, Gaynes suffocated him with the bag. Maybe he did it in the tub, or maybe he just brought the body here."

  She stands up.

  "Ashley Gaynes is now a murderer."

  "C'mon," Frankie says, stopping her as they walked down the stairs. "I want to know."

  "No."

  "We're up here doing all the work, Ingersoll's downstairs… I dunno what. Receiving important instructions from the devil, probably."

  "Ingersoll doesn't take orders," she says.

  "Whatever. I'm just saying, you can tell me. You don't have to tell me in front of him. That's what he wants. He wants to see it unfold. He likes putting things in motion, seeing how they play out. So tell me what's up. Right here. Right now. He doesn't have to have the satisfaction."

  Harriet stares.

  "You ever notice that Ingersoll looks like a praying mantis?" Frankie asks.

  Harriet pushes past him and heads down the stairs.

  "Ashley Gaynes has gone off the reservation," Harriet explains to Ingersoll as Frankie catches up, frowning.

  "Oh?" Ingersoll asks, idly drumming his fingers on an issue of Field and Stream.

  "He's consuming the product, as Hawkins suggested. And he's no longer conning people out of their homes. He's simply murdering them and taking their places."

  "That is a dark turn for our amateur con artist."

  "Yes."

  "I like it. Good for him. Any news of the girl?"

  Harriet hesitates. "No."

  "Any idea where they're going?"

  "No."

  "So you've found very little of value, then."

  Frankie shrugs. Harriet says nothing.

  A thin smile spreads across Ingersoll's face. With his lack of eyebrows, it's difficult to tell whether the smile shows genuine amusement of some sort or is sour and sarcastic.

  He takes a napkin from the napkin holder and unfolds it.

  Then he pulls a pen from his pocket.

  Ingersoll lays the thin napkin over the issue of Field and Stream, then gently runs the pen in a diagonal arc over the napkin.

  Like a child holding up a school-made snowflake, he pinches the napkin at each end and holds it up. On it is revealed a company name and a phone number.

  Harriet reads it aloud: 321 Trucking, then the number.

  "I don't get it," Frankie says.

  Ingersoll stands. "I found the only piece of actionable information in this house, and I never left this table."

  "That's why you're the boss," Frankie says. Harriet hears the exasperation in his voice.

  Ingersoll hands the napkin to Harriet. "Call this trucking company. This will lead us to him, to our case, and to the very special girl. Time is wasting, my friends."

  INTERLUDE

  The Dream

  She's peeing.

  That's not unusual, since it seems like she has to go every thirty seconds, what with the baby doing his little Irish step dance on her bladder. The doctor told her that the pressure would relieve during the second trimester, but her mother said it was a lie, and her mother was right. Big lie.

  Miriam looks up. Someone has carved a message into the stall's wall – odd, because around these parts, girls are pretty girly and don't go carving messages into bathroom stalls on habit. Maybe a swirly ink message, "I Love Mike," but always with marker, never with a knife.

  The message reads: "Merry Christmas, Miriam."

  She finds that strange. Yes, it's almost Christmas, but how does the bathroom stall know that? She sees another message below it, and it reads: "She's coming for you."

  Miriam thinks little of it.

  Somewhere in the distance, she hears: clomp, clomp, clomp. The plodding of boots.

  She's about to pull a few squares of toilet tissue (and here in this bathroom it's about as sturdy as an angel's whisper, so she needs more than a few lest she dampen her hand) and she sees that someone's in the next stall, someone who wasn't there a minute ago.

  One foot ends in a ratty sneaker.

  The other foot is missing below the ankle. It drips black blood on the tile.

  "Merry Christmas," says Ashley's voice. "Don't you miss me?"

  She finds that, in a weird and horrible way, she does. But she shakes it off, and now the feet are gone, and the blood has been cleaned up, and she leaves the stall to wash her hands.

  She's washing her hands.

  She's looking at her hands, not her face, because she doesn't like how the pregnancy has bloated her cheeks, her chin, her everything. She's poofy like those puffy bubble stickers she collected when she was nine. Unicorns and rainbows and all that.

  The sound comes again: clomp, clomp, clomp.

  She's done washing her hands.

  She looks up.

  Her face is pale. Her hair, chestnut – her natural color – and pulled back in a ponytail.

  Something moves behind her. A blur of dark blue, then a flash of red.

  "You killed my son," comes a haggard, horrible whisper.

  Mrs. Hodge stands behind her. Snow galoshes tracking wet footprints into the bathroom. A navy blue snow jacket, dirty and old, sitting awkwardly on her thick torso. The woman's hair is stringy, dark, unwashed, and it hangs like jungle vines across her ruddy face.

  The woman's holding a red snow shovel.

  Miriam grips the porcelain sink –

  The shovel slams into her back.

  Miriam's feet skid out from under her, and the sink clips her on the chin, and when her face hits the tile, she bites her tongue. She doesn't just taste blood; it fills her mouth.

  She reaches out and tries to pull herself away, but the floor is freshly wet and gives her hands no purchase. Her palms squeak and slide across tile.

  "You little poisonous whore," the woman says. "You don't deserve what Ben put in you."

  Wham. The shovel comes down hard between her shoulder blades and then again against her head and again against her back, and the flat metal keeps slamming into her, harder and harder, until she feels something inside of her – like a little glass snowflake between pinching fingers – fracture, crack, and shatter, and she feels a warmth between her legs, a rush of wetness, and her hand reaches down between shovel blows and comes back with the palm wet with red, and she plants one bloody handprint on the floor to pull herself up –

  But it doesn't matter, because the shovel comes down again.

  Miriam hears a baby crying, a hard echo in the bathroom, coming from the hallway. The squalls are suddenly drowned, like the baby's choking, gurgling in its own fluids, and then the screams are cut short entirely and all goes dark.

  She hears Louis's voice whisper in her ear: "Six more
days, then I'm dead."

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  End of the Road

  The whisper, harsh in her ear, lingers as she jolts awake.

  "I'm sorry," Miriam blurts.

  Louis looks over at her as he wheels the truck off past the exit ramp and through a tollbooth. "Sorry for what?"

  For letting you die, she thinks. Her hair is stringy, sweaty. It clings to her forehead.

  "Nothing. I thought – I think I was snoring."

  "You weren't."

  "Well. Good."

  She rubs her eyes. It's night. The windshield is wet from recent rain, but in the jaundiced streetlights it looks like someone pissed all over the glass.

  "Where are we?" she asks.

  "Pennsylvania. Headed toward a truck stop in Coopersburg. I got a buddy up there who's real good with trucks. Has a gift. I like him to do all my maintenance, and whenever I swing through this area, I always pay him a visit."

  She smacks her lips together. Her tongue rasps against the roof of her mouth. A case of total cottonmouth. Cigarette. Coffee. Booze. One of those three would be nice right now.

  "Pennsylvania. Weren't we just in Ohio?"

  "We were. But then you fell asleep."

  "Shit. That's a long trip, isn't it?"

  He shrugs. "Not really. About eight, nine hours. That's the name of the game. Go as far as you can, fast as you can – we get paid by the mile."

  "So that's why most truckers drive like a bull in a china shop."

  "Yup. They're trying to feed their families, so they pop No-Doze or worse and push it. Sometimes beyond the breaking point." His voice gets quiet. "I don't have a home, don't have a family to feed, so I can take it easy. Even taking it easy, I make about thirty-five cents a mile, and today we did a five-hundred-plus mile haul – that's darn near two-hundred bucks. I pull in about sixty grand a year, and I don't have a mortgage, don't have many bills."

  "Does it bother you? This life? You're basically… a nomad. You have no home."

  "Neither do you."

  "I know. And I love it… sometimes. I love that I'm just a piece of garbage floating down the stream – wherever it takes me, it takes me. But I also hate it. I never feel connected to anything or anybody. No anchor. No roots."

  "I feel connected to you," he says.

  "I feel connected to you, too," she responds, and yet she marvels at how feeling connected to him also makes her feel more distant. A paradox, an impossibility, but there it is. She's close to him, but between them lurks a great and monstrous gap: the yawning abyss betwixt life and death.

  He feels it, too. She knows he does, because he's quiet then. He doesn't understand it like she does. He doesn't know what's coming. But she figures, somewhere inside of him, he feels it. The way spiders can sense a thunderstorm, or the way honeybees can signal an earthquake.

  The lights of the local highway strobe into the cab.

  She breaks the silence. "We crashing in the truck tonight?"

  "No," he says. "The truck stop has a motel and a diner attached to it."

  "That's my life. Motels. Diners. Highways."

  "Mine, too."

  Then the silence returns, and the truck rumbles on.

  The tables at the diner are clean, the eggs are good, and the coffee neither looks nor tastes like urine from a diseased kidney. The motel next door, too, is clean. Doesn't stink of puke or cigarettes. No roaches doing a kick-dance on the sink. The motel's doors don't lead right to the parking lot, either. The place has a goddamn genuine hallway. It's like the Four Fucking Seasons, she thinks. Is that what separates a motel from a hotel? Is this actually a hotel? she wonders. Has she ever stayed in a hotel?

  Miriam should feel happy. This is a step up. Louis is a step up.

  She paces outside, smoking, unhappy.

  "You don't know what you're doing," she mumbles to herself.

  It's true. She doesn't.

  She's just been going with it. Garbage in the stream. Be happy. Find bliss. Let it work. Make Louis happy. Don't worry about tomorrow. And that was working fine, just fine.

  "But then, dumbass that you are, you have to go and visit a bona fide psychic who erupts like a goddamn blood geyser and tells you that you're the human equivalent of the Enola Gay. Meanwhile, Louis is going to die in five days and what are you going to do about it? Nothing? Let it happen? Sit back and watch and smoke your goddamn cigarettes?"

  As if angry at the cancer stick, she pinches it and pitches it –

  And Ashley ducks as the glowing cherry whirls over his shoulder.

  "Talking to yourself?" he says.

  It's like seeing a ghost. As if he emerges out of nothing. Miriam can't help but wonder if he's even real. He doesn't sound the same. A tremor quivers below his voice. He itches at his side. His stance is off, even – his confidence is tilted, like his body.

  Miriam pats her jeans pocket. The knife isn't there. Of course it's not there. She had to leave it behind in that woman's thigh when this cocksucker bailed on her.

  "You fucking shitcock asshole."

  "That a way to greet an old friend?" He chuckles. It's not a healthy sound. He's not a ghost.

  "Old friend. That's a good one. You come near me, and I bite. I'll bite off your fingers. I'll bite off your nose." To emphasize, she snaps her teeth together: clack clack.

  Ashley comes closer anyway. He steps into a halo of bleak light. His smooth face is dotted with patchy beard growth. His eyes, hollow. His hair is messy, and not in the purposeful way he once favored – it's now just a greasy tangle.

  "I need your help," he says. He pleads. "I need you."

  "You need a bath. You smell like–" She takes a whiff. "Cat piss. Jesus, Ashley. You're using. You're actually using that stuff."

  "I'm on the run."

  "Then get the hell away from me."

  "They're following me. Dogging my every step. I gotta stay sharp. It's just for now."

  She laughs. "Just for now. I can quit anytime. I didn't know she was fourteen, officer."

  "Fuck you, you alcoholic, nic-fit freak."

  "Those are legal." As if to demonstrate, she taps a cigarette out of the pack and grabs it with her lips. "They also make me smell like a bar, not an overturned litter box."

  "We can go somewhere. We can go anywhere. Just get on a plane and go."

  "Where's the case?"

  His eyes dart to-and-fro. "I've taken care of that. But I can get it when we need it."

  "You can't take a metal suitcase full of crystal meth on a plane, dumb fuck."

  "Then we'll take a bus."

  "Oh, heck, I love the bus," she says. "Nothing better than a twelve-hour ride in an oven-baked casket with unwashed schizophrenics. Super-sweet. Understand something: I'm not going anywhere with you. You're on your own. You left me to die out there, paired up with a gun-toting Annie Wilkes-wannabe. She could've killed me." Probably should've.

  She takes the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and pops it behind her ear. Heel pivots to toe, and then she's turning away from him and heading inside the motel.

  "Wait," he says, coming in after her. The motel clerk – a bald guy in one of those translucent-green poker visors – regards their conversation with sleepy eyes. She doesn't plan on giving him a show. She hits the hallway, passes the ice machine.

  Ashley dogs her.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder. She thinks seriously about biting it, but she doesn't know where those hands have been over the last week.

  Instead, she shoves him back.

  He reaches for her again. She grabs a fistful of his shirt and hurls him backward.

  "I'll tell him," he says, staggering.

  She stops. Over her shoulder, she asks, "Tell what to whom?"

  "Your truck-driver boyfriend. I'll tell him everything."

  Her feet carry her forward, away from Ashley. She heads toward their room. The key is in her hand before she knows it, and she suddenly recognizes that this was a bad move. But she doesn't know where else to g
o or what else to do, and the quiet scared little girl inside of her just wants to go to Louis and curl up in his lap and let him protect her from her mistakes.