Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

  Hairless answers the phone as Frankie ducks through the doorway and comes back with another syringe.

  Miriam struggles, hoping to bring the shower down, maybe the whole house.

  Frankie sticks the needle in her neck.

  "Yes?" Hairless says on the phone.

  The world hems in from the edges. Rimmed with blur and shadow.

  "You have the location?" she hears Hairless say, but it's like hearing him through the glass of a bubbling fish-tank. His words slow. Honey, molasses, black tar. "You know where the trucker is, then?"

  Louis, she thinks.

  Once more, she tongue-kisses darkness. Lights out.

  INTERLUDE

  The Dream

  Miriam's mother sits at a table but doesn't notice her. Can't notice her, probably. That's the frustrating part. Miriam hasn't seen the woman in eight years, and this doesn't even count because it's a dream, and she knows it's a dream.

  Her mother is a pinched woman, shrunken and dry like a shriveled apricot. She's not that old, not really, but she looks it. Time – fake time, dream time, the time in Miriam's own crazy head – has taken its toll.

  "It's almost over now," says Louis behind her.

  The tape over his eyes shifts and bubbles, the way soft drywall rises and falls with a tide of hidden roaches.

  "Yeah," Miriam says.

  "What are we looking at?" Louis checks his wrist like he's looking at a watch, even though no watch is there. "Twentyfour hours or thereabouts."

  Her mother opens a Bible, studies the pages.

  "But if the sacrifice of his offering be a vow," her mother says, "or a voluntary offering, it shall be eaten the same day he offereth the sacrifice, and on the morrow also the remainder shall be eaten. But the remainder of the flesh of the sacrifice on the third day shall be burnt by fire."

  Idly, lost in thought, Miriam nods. "That what it is? Funny how you know that, because if you know that, it means I know that, and yet – I didn't know that. I haven't seen the time since the… car ride."

  "Could be that the subconscious mind is a powerful little booger."

  "I suppose so."

  "Or maybe I'm something bigger, meaner, something outside of you. Maybe I'm Death himself. Maybe I'm Abaddon, Lord of the Pit, or Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds. Or perhaps it's that I'm just a bundle of thread cut from the mean, uncaring scissors of Atropos – I'm just the tangled skein of fate lying on the floor at your feet."

  "That's great. Thanks for fucking with me in my own dream."

  Her mother speaks again: "For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison."

  "Shut up, Mom." To Louis, Miriam says: "That's her telling me I have a filthy mouth."

  "It's you telling you that you have a filthy mouth."

  "Whatever."

  "What happens next?" he asks.

  "Nothing, I guess. Last I checked, I was hanging from a dirty showerhead in a moldy cottage found somewhere in the approximate middle of New Jersey's sandy asshole. As such, I'm not really making any plans."

  "So you're done with trying to save me?"

  "Well, looking at my options–"

  "Give, and it shall be given to you," her mother interrupts.

  "I'm talking, Mom."

  Her mother continues: "For whatever measure you deal out to others, it will be dealt back to you in return."

  "As I was saying!" Miriam barks, hoping to jar her dream mother out of her Bible-quoting reverie. The woman doesn't budge. She's like a kidney stone lodged in the urethra – not going anywhere. "As I was saying, I'm out of options. I'm done trying to play savior, done thinking I can make a difference."

  "That's awfully fatalistic."

  "Fatalistic. Fate. Fatal. Would you look at that? Ain't language a crazy bitch? Stupid me, never drawn the connection before. Fate and fatal. That tells you something, doesn't it? It tells you that all our lives are a donkey-cart ride over a cliff's edge. Everybody's fate is to die, and why try to stop it? We all tumble into darkness with the donkey, braying and hee-hawing, and that's that, game over. I see the fatalities of people. I see how their fate plays out. And I haven't been able to do dick about it before, have I? It's like trying to stop a speeding train by putting a penny on the tracks."

  "That actually works."

  "It does not, shut up. I'm fucked here, which means you're fucked, too."

  "He stabs out my eyes."

  Miriam's heart goes cold. "I know."

  "I call your name before I die. Isn't that strange?"

  "No," she lies.

  "I'm going to die."

  "Everybody dies."

  "I die badly, painfully, tortured to death."

  "It is what it is."

  "You did this to me. You have to undo it."

  "Fate gets what fate wants."

  Her mother turns to her.

  She looks into Miriam's eyes. Even though she's sitting, she reaches up with arms made long, so long they stretch across the room, and pulls Miriam to her. The world shifts, drags, smears in long blurs and streaks of light.

  Her mother says: "And thine eye shall not pity, but life shall go for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

  Miriam stammers, "I don't understand–"

  And then the dream is rudely ended.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ain't Torture Grand?

  Rudely ended by a fist, actually.

  Harriet's fist. Right in Miriam's solar plexus. The air sucks out of her lungs. She'd double over if she could, but she can't, so instead she just coughs like she's trying to expel a squirming knot of angry weasels from her chest cavity.

  "Awake now?" Harriet asks.

  Miriam blinks away the haze from whatever drugs Frankie stuck into her. She notices that Harriet is wearing black gloves. So I don't see how she dies? Is she really that much of a control freak?

  "In a manner of–" She wants to say speaking, but she only wheezes and hacks, trying to find breath to fill her windbags.

  "The solar plexus is an excellent place to hit," Harriet explains. "At least, it is if your target is untrained. It's a massive bundle of nerves. Fighters know to toughen and tighten that area. They strengthen the muscles there to form a braid of armor. For everybody else, though, it's a beautiful and easy target to strike."

  Miriam draws one last gasp, feels like her body has caught up with itself.

  "Thanks for the MMA fighting lesson, Tito Ortiz."

  "I don't know who that is."

  Miriam licks her dry, cracked lips. "Not really a surprise. So, hey, thanks for waking me up out of my dream. It was getting a little too creepy in there for me; my head is no longer a safe place to visit, I think. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

  Harriet's hand forms a flat hatchet blade, and she chops it right into Miriam's neck.

  Miriam gags and gasps anew. Her face goes red. Her eyes feel like they might suck back into her brain or pop out and roll across the floor.

  "Mastoid process," Harriet clarifies. "Protects the windpipe. Hit that, and it forces the target to gag. The gag reflex is an instant limiter in a fight. It represents a terrible panic state for the body, which offers supreme advantage to the attacker."

  When Miriam can breathe again, and when she's curtailed the urge to dry heave the dust and acid that's probably lining her stomach, she speaks.

  "Why the–" Hack, cough. "– play-by-play?"

  "Because I want you to know that I know what I'm doing."

  "Again, why?"

  "So your instinct will be to fear me. Eventually, my very presence becomes torture. If a man abuses a dog enough, soon the dog fears all men. The dog becomes weak. The creature exists in the flight mode of fight or flight, always ready to piss itself and turn tail."

  Miriam almost laughs. "Trust me, I fear you. I fear the unmerciful shit out of you. Though, truth be told, I a
lso fear that haircut of yours. It looks like someone cut it with a fire axe. Jesus, you could probably slit somebody's throat with those bangs."

  Harriet just delivers three hammer punches to Miriam's armpit.

  Miriam's body is a switchboard of pain. She cries out.

  "Armpit. Another major bundle of nerves."

  "What do you want?" Miriam shouts. "You want to ask me something? I'll tell you! Just ask. Stop it, please. Just stop."

  "Begging. That's new for you."

  Miriam almost weeps. "I like to remain versatile. Like a shark, swim forward or die. So, just ask me what you want to ask me. I'm an open book."

  "I have nothing to ask you."

  "You're not trying to find out how Hairless dies?"

  Harriet shakes her head.

  "Then why are you doing this?"

  Harriet smiles. It's a scary sight. Her teeth are small, tiny white pebbles in that ankle-biter mouth. "Because I really enjoy it."

  Shit. She's going to kill you.

  Miriam has to find a way out of this. To forestall it, then stop it.

  Miriam reaches: "Hairless wants you to torture me endlessly? Seems strange that you're just going to abuse your new coworker into bloody, babbling uselessness."

  "He doesn't know. This isn't his desire. It's mine." Harriet's eye twinkles. "Sometimes a girl has to take a little time for herself."

  "And a mani-pedi just wouldn't do?"

  Harriet puts one foot up on the tub's rim.

  "You and me," she says, "we're alike."

  "That's true," Miriam says, going with it. But she thinks: On Bizarroworld.

  "We're both survivors. We both do what we have to do to make it to the next day. But even more important, you and I enjoy what we do. You're a monster, and I'm a monster, and we embrace it. I embrace it more than you, of course. You still pretend that you're troubled, tortured, a little drama queen with the back of her hand pressed to her head – oh, woe is me. I've moved past that."

  "Nothing about you is troubled or tortured?" Miriam asks.

  "Nothing that bothers me anymore. I've let it all go."

  "How'd you manage that?"

  "Ingersoll showed me the way."

  "Hairless? And how's that? I bet it's a real interesting story."

  Harriet tells her.

  INTERLUDE

  Harriet's Story

  I chopped up my husband and ran him through the garbage disposal.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Short, But Not Sweet

  Miriam waits to see if there's more.

  Harriet stands firm-jawed, flexing her fists.

  Somewhere, crickets are chirping. Tumbleweeds are tumbling. Between Miriam and Harriet sits a giant gulf, a wide open space occupied by a howling wind and not much more.

  As a delaying tactic, this does Miriam little good.

  "That's it?" Miriam says.

  Harriet seems confused. "What do you mean?"

  "That's not a story. That's the end of a story."

  "It suits me fine."

  "I just figure," Miriam says, "that there's more to this tale. You don't just one day up and chop up your husband and stuff him down the – garbage disposal? Really?"

  "It's doable," Harriet says without inflection. "Not the bones. But the rest."

  "Your husband."

  "My husband."

  Once more, silence. The house around them settles: creaking, squeaking, a quiet cracking like the sound of a spoon hitting the burnt sugar crust of crème brûlée.

  "I just – I just feel like a story is hiding in there somewhere."

  Harriet steps up over the tub's lip and elbows Miriam in the face. In the jaw, actually. Miriam sees a burst of white light followed by a sucking vortex of outer space, like a black hole coming for her on a galloping horse. Once more, she tastes blood. Her tongue idly searches out a wiggly tooth toward the back of her mouth.

  Miriam turns her head and spits scarlet sputum against the faded tile. Spat. She thinks first about hawking it into Harriet's eye, but at this point, she can't imagine that would be productive. Maybe later.

  "Oooo-kay," Miriam says, already feeling her lip going fat and numb, "so you just one day up and decided to hack up your husband and shove him into the garbage disposal."

  "It was deserved, if that's what you're asking."

  "It's not. But it sounds like, contrary to what you were suggesting earlier, there's more to the story." Miriam blinks. "I think I'm drooling blood."

  "You are."

  "Oh. Good to know."

  Harriet's cell phone vibrates. She opens it, looks at the screen so that Miriam cannot see. Her face shows no emotion, but she does pause and seem to consider.

  Then, finally, Harriet shrugs and tells her story in full.

  INTERLUDE

  Harriet's Story,

  This Time With Feeling

  Walter never made sense to me.

  I married him because it's what you did. It's what my mother did. My grandmother. It's what all the girls in my neighborhood did. They found men, and they supported those men through thick and thin. In my life, women were crutches. Stepping stools. Vacuum cleaners with breasts.

  My husband never had any sense of elegance, no grasp of sequence or consequence.

  When a storm rides up the coast, it leaves debris. Loose boards, paper cups, flotsam, jetsam. Nothing but discards and broken things.

  That was Walter. He'd come home from work – sales manager at a pigment plant, where they sold dyes and pigments to cosmetic manufacturers, mostly – and his process was a casting off, a dismissal of the order I'd created.

  That's what I remember most about Walter. The signs of his passing.

  He'd have pigment on his shoes, and there'd be blue footprints on the carpet.

  He'd kick those shoes off under the coffee table and leave them there.

  Dirty handprints on a shirt, a curtain, the armrests of his chair.

  A tie hanging on a doorknob or the headboard to our bed.

  A greasy highball glass on the corner of the nightstand.

  His very touch was like cancer. He'd take a good thing – organization, cleanliness, perfection – and subvert it, diminish it, dirty it up and dry it out.

  Our intimate life was no different. He'd lie atop me, grunting and thrusting. Always with that grotesque slapping of skin, like the sound of a chorus of frogs or toads forever applauding.

  His hands were always so sweaty. His hair, too, by the end of it. I felt drowned in the stuff. He ate submarine sandwiches during the day. Oil, vinegar, onion, garlic. It came out in his sweat; wherever he touched me, he left that odor behind. I felt greasy. Pawed. Molested.

  Walter was a clumsy ape.

  Three years into our marriage, Walter wanted to have children. He told me so right after dinner. We never ate together; it was always him at the coffee table and me in the other room, at the breakfast nook, waiting for him to be done so I could go try to clean up his messes before they left a permanent mark.

  That night I'd made rigatoni in pink sauce, a vodka sauce. I remember this as plain as day. One of the noodles had jumped the edge of his plate – he was always so sloppy with his eating – and sat there on the carpet. It was like a worm, burrowing in. The melted Parmesan cheese had already stuck to the fibers. The pink sauce had already soaked in. I thought, I'll need to steamclean the whole carpet. Again.

  That's when he said it.

  He stood up, put his hand on the small of my back as I bent over to pick up the fallen noodle, and said it so matter-of-factly.

  "Let's have kids."

  Three words. Each word a clump of dirt. Each a dirty noodle on the carpet.

  I stood up and I had my first moment of rebellion.

  I said, "We'll have children when you stop acting like a dirty little baby."

  Walter had a chance there. He could have saved himself. He could have said something nice or just said nothing.

  But he opened his mouth and said, "You watch your god
damn mouth."

  And he did this… thing. He grabbed my wrist – the wrist that led to the hand that still held that stupid rigatoni noodle – and he gripped my wrist tight, so tight it hurt. He meant for it to hurt. I saw it in his eyes.