Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

  She opens the door and calmly walks in.

  She closes the door behind her and locks it.

  She sits on the bed, trembling.

  Louis is already up and alert. He looks concerned.

  "What was that? What was that in the hallway?"

  Miriam stares forward. She bites her lip. She tries to say something and can't find words.

  Then: a pounding at the door.

  "What is that?" Louis asks. "Who is that?"

  "Don't answer the door," Miriam says.

  "Don't – what? Why not?" He moves toward the door.

  She grabs his hand as he passes. "You don't have to. You can just ignore it. Ignore it. Please."

  Then he asks the question. It's telling. It tells what he really thinks about her, or more accurately, what he fears about her.

  He asks, "What have you done?"

  "I…" The words don't trail off so much as they never manifest to begin with.

  Louis goes to the door and opens it.

  Ashley shoulders his way into the room as if Louis isn't there. Arms crossed tight in front of him, rocking back and forth like he's some kind of mule-kicked simpleton, Ashley stands in front of Miriam. "I need to know how I die. Tell me how I die. They don't kill me. Tell me they don't kill me. I know they're coming, Miriam. You can help me; I need you to help me–"

  "Hey," Louis barks. But then he sees who it is. "Is that your brother?"

  Ashley laughs. "I'm not her brother, bro."

  "What? Miriam?"

  "Don't look at her. Look at me. We're here to rob your ass. This is a scam. A con."

  Miriam says nothing.

  Louis frowns. "You'd better tell me what's going on, son."

  "We know you've got bank. All that money in envelopes. Hand it over. Or else."

  "Or else what?"

  Ashley pulls a gun – really just his thumb and index finger shaped into a gun. "This, motherfucker. Now stick 'em up." He cocks his thumb back like he's ready to fire.

  Louis lays Ashley out with one punch. Bam.

  It's like a wrecking ball. Ashley topples backward onto the bed. He starts to get up, dizzy – the punch should have put him down for an hour, but whatever meth is still crawling through his system is happy to animate his body like a puppet on strings.

  With his meaty hands, Louis picks Ashley's entire body up and pitches him backward into the bedside table. A lamp spins off and crashes into the ground, casting that corner of the room into darkness. Louis then grabs Ashley by the ankle and drags him back around the bed toward the door, with Ashley's head hitting the table legs on a crummy desk, the corner of the dresser and TV stand, and even the rubber door stopper.

  Louis throws Ashley out of the room, then slams the door.

  A sense of mad elation fills Miriam's heart. He saved her. He did so without asking any questions. He saw the threat and eliminated it. She feels protected. She feels safe.

  Miriam leaps to her feet and throws her arms around Louis's prodigious torso.

  He doesn't return the embrace.

  Gently, he pushes her back.

  "Is it true?" he asks.

  Her heart sinks.

  "Louis–"

  "Just tell me, is it true? He's not your brother? Were you planning on robbing me?"

  "Not at first, but then – then maybe – but not now, not now, I ditched him, that's why I ditched him, you have to believe me, I never wanted–"

  But Louis moves away from her and starts throwing his items back in his bag.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Away," he says. "Away from you."

  "Louis, wait."

  "No. My truck's not in the shop yet, not until morning. I'm just going to leave. Room's yours for the night if you want it. I don't much care. But I can't abide liars."

  She grabs his wrist, but then he grabs hers in return. His grip is gentle enough, but she knows that with a twist of his wrist, he could snap her arm into brittle bits.

  "You were right. You are poison. You tried to tell me. I should've listened."

  He takes a deep breath, then says the word that is a knife that goes right through her heart:

  "Goodbye."

  Bag over his shoulder, he pushes his way out of the room, steps over Ashley's supine body, and moves silently down the hallway until he's out of sight.

  Miriam hasn't cried in a long time, but she cries now.

  Hard, wracking sobs. Her eyes burn. Her ribs hurt. She cries the way a child cries: gasping, hitching, keening.

  Over her cries, she can hear his truck rumble to life.

  The sound grows to a growl, then fades.

  Louis pulls his truck out of the lot and back onto the highway.

  He doesn't think much of the black Escalade that passes him, going in as he goes out.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Shocking Developments

  It doesn't take long for Miriam's sadness to crystallize into a sharp spike of anger. Her tears become acid. Her frown a curved blade. Her trembling hands like reciprocating saws, ready to vibrate messily through offending flesh.

  She's up. She stands in the doorway. Ashley sits like a piece of windblown trash against the wall, a bleary, almost drunken smile smeared across his face. One sleepy lid half-closed.

  "Can we go now?"

  She kicks him in the mouth.

  The back of his head cracks into the wall. Her heel knocks one of his bottom front teeth out, and it hops across the carpet like a jumping bean before coming to a rest.

  A trickle of red wets his lip.

  "Ow," he says.

  A few rooms down, a door opens and a pale man with jowls like a slobbery dog's muzzle peers out. Miriam tells him if he doesn't put his head back inside his room, she's going to tear it off and piss fire in his neck hole.

  He turtles swiftly back into his room.

  "The trucker. He left, didn't he?"

  Miriam says nothing. She is a smoldering volcano.

  Ashley wipes his lips. "That's going to be a problem, then."

  "Go to hell."

  "You love me," he says, spitting blood.

  "Keep dreaming."

  "You need me."

  "That might've been true before. It's not true now."

  He grins. Red teeth, like he's been eating raspberries. "You want me."

  "I pity you."

  She hawks up a gob of phlegm. She's about to spit it into his smiling mouth.

  Then –

  Down the hall, they appear. Like two shadows. Two demons.

  Frankie in his black suit. Harriet, not in her turtleneck but in a dark red blouse, a Christmas blouse, even though it's almost July.

  They have pistols.

  Miriam sees them, and Ashley doesn't, not at first. But his eyes follow her eyes, and when he finally realizes –

  "We're dead," he says, a hoarse, panicked whisper.

  Miriam is not prepared. Normally, she'd have this place cased out. She'd know her exits. Her corners. Her safe places and vulnerabilities. Being with Louis made her slow, lazy. When she was a child, her mother used to walk her through the store holding her hand, gripping it so hard Miriam thought her knuckles might break. But she eventually learned not to fight, because that way her mother would relax her grip – and then, oops, Miriam could slip her grasp and run off to the candy or cereal aisle. This is like that. She relaxed her grip.

  Right now, she has only one real option: the emergency exit to her right, at the end of the hall. While they stalk down the hall, she'll flee into the open lot.

  Everything seems to move in slow motion, like she's got chains around her arms, legs, waist, pulling her back, halting her escape.

  She pivots –

  Ashley tries to lurch to his feet, but he's weak, beaten –

  Miriam's running, but behind her the two killers move without hesitation, hands up, pistols up –

  They're twenty feet away now and closing –

  Ashley can't stand. He's on all fours, scrabbling li
ke a panicked animal trying to clamber up a rocky escarpment. He's crying out –

  Fifteen feet now, maybe less. She can't tell; everything seems wrong –

  Miriam feels something dart by her ear; she jerks her head left as a wire with two metal probes on it tinks against a fauxgold wall sconce. She doesn't know what it is until –

  Ashley cries out, a stuttering wail through closed teeth; his body seizes, goes rigid, eyes wide like a pair of headlights –

  Taser, she thinks, not pistols. Tasers, they missed me –

  Her shoulder crashes into the emergency exit, throwing it wide. No alarm goes off; no alarm ever goes off, no matter what the warnings say. In places like this they never seem to be hooked up to a goddamn thing. She tastes the evening air; she sees the highway ahead of her –

  Wham.

  An arm in a white sleeve clotheslines her trachea. Her heels go out from under her. Her back cracks hard into the exit door, slamming it shut behind her.

  She looks up, gasping for air.

  "You," she wheezes.

  The man seems taken aback. A smile plays at the edges of his lips.

  "We have not met," he says.

  Bam. Someone – Frankie, Harriet, both – hits the emergency

  door from the other side, but whoever it is doesn't expect Miriam to be leaning back against it, and they don't make it through the first time. She feels like a bird in a net, wildly flapping its wings. She knows she has to get away, has to get free, lest they – well, she doesn't know what they'll do to her, but she knows it can't be good.

  Miriam lurches to her feet, clearing the door just as Frankie slams into it thinking he needs all his weight and momentum. He comes tumbling out like a cascade of brooms from an overcrowded closet.

  Frankie stumbles and stands between Miriam and the tall, hairless man.

  She shoves Frankie hard into Hairless Fucker. They both go down, and a tiny voice inside her is thrilled that the sonofabitch might get his bright white suit dirty.

  Like a deer fleeing the hunt, she bolts across the lot toward the highway.

  It's a fast highway. Two lanes, each way.

  It's all rushing metal, glaring headlights. A stampede of steel at 70 MPH.

  Miriam doesn't think. She just runs. Straight into traffic.

  Her foot hits the median before she even realizes it. Behind her, the delirious effect of honking. Brakes, screeching.

  She's out in the other lane – a car whips past her, the mirror nearly clipping her outstretched hand clean off just before spinning her like a top – when she hears the hard crash of metal on metal, glass on glass, airbags and gravel and screaming. She hears someone from this lane say "Holy shit!" when they see whatever's going on in that lane, and Miriam knows she just caused a car accident, maybe a bad one, but she doesn't look back, because looking back means slowing down and slowing down means getting dead.

  You're a bad person, she thinks.

  You just caused a car wreck.

  And a tiny part of you is happy about it, because it's a distraction for them, a slow-down, an obstacle.

  You're a user. Even when you don't mean to be.

  People might be hurt. You could stop and help –

  But another voice reminds her: it is what it is, fate gets what it wants, this has already been written, so move, move, move.

  Her foot hits the highway shoulder on the other side. An umpire's voice in her head yells, Safe! A car behind her drones its horn. Endlessly. She pictures a body slumped over, head on the wheel, but she hopes that's not what it is, that it's just the car.

  The umpire in her head is wrong, though. She knows she's not safe. That's just an illusion.

  Miriam keeps running.

  Ahead of her, a storage lot. Row after row of orange storage units.

  It's a twenty-four hour facility, but it's got a gate and a keypad, and it's closed up tighter than a choirboy's asshole with a perimeter fence topped with a row of barbed wire. But that's a feature, not a bug. Miriam jumps. Hits the fence like a shark.

  She climbs.

  The barbed wire is old. Hasn't been maintained. No tension. It bows under her hands. But it still bites her, still tears ragged claw-marks in her jeans and the skin beneath. She reminds herself that she hasn't had a tetanus shot lately, and wouldn't that just be the bee's knees, escaping her killers but dying of fucking lockjaw? But she's up and over and landing hard on the other side.

  The impact goes up her shins and into her knees and the pain is bad (maybe you broke something), but she doesn't stop. The fact that she can run, even with pain, means nothing is broken, right? (Says the girl who is not a doctor.)

  The storage units are bathed in sodium light, but pockets of shadow remain.

  Miriam darts into the heart of the storage unit. Seven rows deep. Five units in.

  The stink of rotten fast food hits her, but she doesn't care; she hunkers down behind a trash can, makes herself as small as she can between the two storage units.

  She waits.

  That was him.

  The hairless fuck with the fillet knife. The one who cuts out both of Louis's eyes and stabs him in the brain to kill him.

  Proof positive, yet again, that Miriam is the one who causes this. The chain of events replays out, a cruel and taunting filmstrip, flip, flip, flip, a cascading series of what ifs: if she didn't get in that truck with him, if she didn't get hooked up with Ashley, if she didn't go back to Louis…

  But still, it isn't coming together. She doesn't understand. Not yet. Louis is gone. They're here. He's not. Why would they connect with him? Unfinished business?

  It doesn't make any sense.

  One thing she knows, though, is that fate never shows its hand early. It always waits till the last possible moment to turn the cards.

  The show ain't over yet.

  She's spotted.

  The only weapon she's got is a broken stick she found on the ground behind her, and she thinks, I'm not going out without a fight. She'll stick it in someone's eye. For payback. Some kind of first-strike retaliation where the revenge comes before the act committed. Vengeance of the time-traveler, vindication born of prevision.

  "You all right?" comes the voice.

  It's a man. Not Frankie. Not the Hairless Fucker.

  Mid-thirties. Light beard. Glasses. Hair lacquered to his forehead with sweat, baseball hat in hand. He peers over and around the trashcan.

  "Miss?"

  She stands. She doesn't know how long she's been here. A half-hour? An hour? Longer? Sirens have come and gone from the accident. All's been quiet but for a couple-few cars coming in and out of the facility (and with each car, her heart pauses, her breath waits).

  The guy's eyes widen when he sees her.

  "You're bleeding," he says.

  Miriam doesn't know how to respond. She remains sandwiched in the space between the two units; exposure could mean death. It's not death she's worried about. It's what comes before.

  "Yes," she says. Dumb. But it's all she has.

  "Were you in that accident?"

  "Yes," she lies. Though maybe it's not a lie. She was certainly present for it.

  "Do you need help?"

  She fires back with a question of her own: "Do you have a car?"

  "Yeah. I was here just putting a few more things into a storage unit before our move to the new house, and – sorry. You don't really need to know this. My Forester is parked around the corner."

  "Will you take me somewhere?"

  He hesitates. He's not sure, and he's right to be uncertain. Miriam knows that elements don't add up. No glass in her hair. The cuts on her legs aren't from a car accident. He hasn't asked the right questions in his head yet, but he will. She only hopes by the time he comes up short, they're already in the car, driving far, far away from this place. You're going to get out of this – a rat through a bolthole, almost there, just a little farther…

  "Yeah," he says, finally. "Absolutely. Here, this way. My name's Jeff–"


  She moves to step out.

  The man, Jeff, flicks his gaze left.