Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

  She thumbed back the hammer so that the trigger pull would be nothing at all, just a little tug, the barest whisper of movement. Just to be sure, she pushed her chin down on the barrel.

  But then she saw –

  Two shadows underneath the bathroom door.

  Two shadows that equated to two feet. Harriet's feet.

  She's listening at the door, Miriam thought.

  And that pissed her off.

  This was her moment. Her death. Harriet had lent it a poetic veneer, but now the twat was standing on the other side of the door, snickering like she had stuck Miriam's hand into a cup of warm water while she slept?

  She raised the gun. It felt like her muscles were about to tear from their moorings along her arm bones and go sling-shotting against the broken mirror.

  She didn't aim, didn't try to imagine where it was that Harriet was standing. It was all automatic. A total reflex.

  She fired, bang.

  Seconds later came a mumbled statement (carpet noodle), and a thump.

  Miriam steps over the body. It takes her a while to get there, what with her body feeling like hammered shit. She sees herself in the mirror before she leaves the bathroom – her face looks like a gray pillowcase stuffed with softballs, and her already pale skin makes a terrible contrast with the endless streaks of drying red.

  She looks like a murder scene.

  But she's alive, she thinks, as she stands over Harriet's body.

  The stocky woman lies with her mouth open, her blood and brains emptying onto the carpet and soaking in real good.

  Miriam looks down at the gloves on Harriet's hands.

  "Guess we know how you die after all," Miriam says. It sounds like she's got a mouth full of rocks and molasses. She tries to laugh, but it pains her too much. She coughs. She's afraid her ribcage is going to come up her throat or out her ass. Every square inch of her body throbs.

  She nudges Harriet, half-expecting Little Napoleon to lurch up and start biting at her Achilles' tendons, but the woman experiences no such miraculous resurrection.

  Now: Louis.

  Miriam doesn't really believe she can save him. But she knows she's there when it happens. The vision showed her that.

  The question is: where?

  No. Wait. The first question is: when?

  Miriam bends over – ow, ow, ow – and finds Harriet's cell phone in the pocket of the dead woman's black pants.

  4.30pm.

  Louis dies in three hours.

  Cell phone in hand, Miriam staggers through a moldering kitchen in 70s décor and out through a half-cocked screen door. Outside, gray skies pass above an endless vista of bent and meager pines, each a bleak needle, each a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

  A gravel drive circles the ramshackle cottage, cutting through the pines.

  Nearby, on a crooked fencepost with no fence, a fat crow sits staring.

  "I don't know where I am," she tells the bird. The crow takes to oily wing. "Thanks for the help."

  All right, think, she thinks. The New Jersey Pine Barrens. That's like, what? Only about a million acres of scrubby pineland and sandy loam. And Louis dies in a lighthouse. New Jersey doesn't have too many of those – ohhhh, only maybe two dozen. I'm sure I can hit all of them in the next three hours, right after I make a beeline for civilization. Which is assuredly right around the corner, and by "right around the corner," I mean, "miles from this place."

  This is an impossible task.

  It can't be impossible! she thinks. I'm there. I somehow manage to show up. What fate wants, fate gets, and fate wants my ass in that lighthouse. Think!

  But she can't think. Her brain hits a dull wall, a dead-end – and it keeps hitting it, like a bee against a windowpane. Maybe it's the pain that's blunting her brainpower. Maybe shock and trauma are merrily skipping in tandem to drag down her thought processes.

  She's looking for a sign. If fate wants her to show up, fate will have to give her a ride.

  The cell phone in her hand rings.

  It vibrates, too, and it scares her so bad she almost throws it into the woods like a live hand grenade.

  Luckily, she bites back that impulse. She looks at the phone.

  Frankie.

  Her heart seizes.

  She answers the phone.

  "What?" she asks, trying to mimic Harriet's matte tone. Her sore throat and swollen lip seem to help.

  "How's the girl?" he asks. The signal's weak, but she can still hear him.

  "No trouble," Miriam says. She embellishes a bit: "That cocktail kicked her ass."

  Frankie pauses.

  Shit! Dummy. Don't embellish. Harriet wouldn't embellish.

  "You okay?" he asks, suspicious.

  "I'm fine."

  "You sound different."

  "Said I'm fine."

  Another pause. "You sound like you wanna do something to that girl. Hurt her, maybe."

  "Don't push me."

  "Okay! Okay. Jesus, don't get creepy."

  Miriam winces, and decides that this is her only shot.

  "Where are you at?" she asks.

  "We got the trucker. I forgot that he was a big boy. Needed two of the cocktails to put him down, but it worked. Ingersoll's got him in the Escalade, and I'm going to take the truck and go burn it."

  "Where you taking him?"

  "Ingersoll's got a bug up his ass for somewhere with a little verticality. He says a storm is coming, and he wants to harness its power and, uhh… how'd he put it? 'Read the skies.' We got a line on a lighthouse under construction. I guess they're putting in a new… big giant light, or whatever the fuck it is you need to replace on a lighthouse."

  "Where's the lighthouse?"

  "Why?"

  Fuck! I don't know why!

  She clenches her eyes shut, and tries: "I don't answer to you."

  "Sorry," he says. "Uhhhh. Barnegat, I think. Long Beach Island. Wherever it is, it smells like dead fish and medical waste."

  "I have to go. The girl is waking up."

  "Give her a kiss for me," Frankie says.

  "Don't be cute."

  Miriam hangs up.

  She holds the cell phone in her hand. The pain is still present in her body – it's beating her like a drum – but it no longer bothers her. Miriam feels alive. Present in the moment. In the deep distance, thunder clears its throat with an acid rumble.

  Taking a deep breath, Miriam strides out to the driveway.

  She gets about ten feet, then turns around.

  She's in the cottage for thirty seconds.

  When she emerges anew, she has the pistol in one hand, her diary in the other, and the cell phone nestled in her pocket.

  She starts walking.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The First Hour

  Miriam feels like she's been walking for hours. She checks the phone, and every time it feels like it's five minutes forward, sometimes less.

  The gravel road – "road" being the most optimistic term possible for this long stretch of sunken pits and limestone scree – is a straight ribbon through leaning pines and anemic bramble, a ribbon that seems infinitely unrolled. Her steps appear to take her no farther. The adrenalin rush is gone; her muscles stiffen with every step, and a small voice inside her head wonders: Did I actually die? Maybe this is rigor mortis setting in.

  The trees have grown over the road, a canopy of skeletal hands. Sparrows and starlings flit from branch to branch. Thunder continues to rumble in the distance.

  "Thatta girl," Louis says, walking next to her. "I knew you had it in you. Such a buck-up spirit. This time, you're embracing fate. You know you show up when Louis dies. So you forge ahead. I like the new you. Be a fountain, not a drain, I always say. Be the leaf in the stream that goes with the waters, not the dam that stands against them. Am I right?"

  Miriam has little patience. She offers the hallucination no more than a passing glance and a throaty grunt.

  "No glib commentary?" Louis asks. A yellow jacket pushes i
ts way out from under his eye-tape and orbits his head before zipping off into the trees.

  "I need a cigarette."

  "That's not very glib. I'm disappointed."

  "I'd like a drink."

  "Still not impressed. This really is a new you."

  "Choke on a turd."

  "Then again," Louis says, "maybe not."

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Second Hour

  She hears the highway before she sees it.

  That familiar Doppler rush of cars. The passing growl of a motorcycle.

  Miriam staggers to the edge of the seemingly infinite gravel drive, alone. (Louis's future ghost has long left her behind, though from time to time she sees him passing through the trees as she stumbles forth.)

  The road ahead is two-lane. Gray macadam. A crusty, broken dividing line like a spattered stripe of golden piss.

  She blinks and tucks the gun away in the back of her waistband.

  She's been here before. Countless times. Standing on the highway shoulder, thumb out, hoping to catch a ride the way a remora fish wants to cling tight to a swiftly moving shark (a shark swiftly moving toward food, since the remora is like the vulture, which is like the crow, which is like Miriam herself – scavenger, carrion-feeder, and all around lazy fuck).

  Once more, she seeks a ride to somebody's death.

  The thumb-out hitchhiker trick won't do it this time. It's too slow. Most people know what they're getting when they pick up a highway drifter: an addict, a crazy person, a serial rapist, a big giant question mark that isn't worth answering.

  Miriam just doesn't have the time.

  She sees a car coming. Subaru Outback station wagon, a couple years past its prime.

  Miriam steps out in front of the speeding hunk of Japanese automation. Late, too late, the gray glare on the windshield passes and Miriam can see that the woman is on her cell phone, probably not paying attention to something so insignificant as, say, the road.

  Still, Miriam doesn't budge.

  The car bears down. Doesn't stop.

  Then, last minute, squealing brakes. The car's ass-end starts to wobble like the hips of an old dog, but it's too little, too late.

  The car hits Miriam.

  Luckily, by the time it does, it's only going a couple miles an hour.

  It still hurts (right now, the breeze blowing hurts every micrometer of Miriam's skin; even her hair feels pain), but it's more jarring than anything else.

  Still, it gives Miriam a second wind, a boot-kick of adrenalin.

  The woman behind the car is dumbstruck. She's an older woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, with a white-blonde drill instructor haircut that suggests she's either a lesbian or just one of those women who no longer gives a shit or the time to fix her hair in the morning.

  The phone slides out of her hand, but the hand stays held to her ear. It'd be comical if Miriam had a sense of humor left.

  The woman seems to get her bearings and reaches for the steering wheel, and Miriam sees that panicked rabbit look.

  Sighing, she pulls the gun, points it at the windshield.

  The woman's hands go up.

  "Good lesbian," Miriam murmurs, then comes around to the passenger side and eases her screaming bones into the seat.

  The woman gapes. Miriam holds the gun in an unsteady hand.

  "Barnegat Light," Miriam says.

  The woman's mouth moves, but no words come out.

  "Sorry," Miriam says. "I meant it as a question. Barnegat Light?"

  "Whuh-what about it?" The woman's voice is raspy, like she's talking through a coffee grinder. Obviously a smoker. Miriam wonders if that's what she'll sound like in twenty years.

  "Where is it?"

  "Luh-Long Beach Island. At the northern tip."

  "How do I get there, and how long?"

  "You go that way," the woman indicates the direction opposite of the way she was going, "until you reach the Garden State Expressway. Then you take that south – no! North, north, sorry, until you can get onto 72, and 72 will take you east over the causeway to LBI. Only one muh-main road on LBI, so just head north till you see the lighthouse. It's maybe a forty-five minute trip, maybe uh, an hour."

  "Last question. You smoke?"

  The woman nods, hasty, shaky.

  "Give me your cigarettes."

  The driver fumbles a box of Virginia Slims from the cupholder in the door.

  "Uck. You smoke these?" Miriam asks, then waves it off. "Whatever."

  Miriam takes the pack, and her finger touches –

  It's twenty-three years from now and the woman steps off her porch. She's a bag of bird bones, and she trembles her way out the driveway as a light snow drifts around her, carried on whorls and corkscrews by a cold wind. The woman goes to the mailbox, gets the mail, and then takes one step on a shoe-sized patch of black ice. Her leg kicks out, her head hits the mailbox, and she lies there. Hours pass. Evening comes. Snow builds up on her face, but she's still not dead, and she manages to pull out a slim little cigarette from her pink robe and light it up before finally succumbing to the slow dragging hands of hypothermia.

  – the woman's finger as the pack passes between their grips.

  Miriam blinks. Shakes it off, then thumbs in the cigarette lighter, gets it warmed up, and plugs one of the thin little pipe cleaner cigarettes into her mouth.

  "Now," Miriam mumbles around the unlit cigarette, "get the fuck out of this car before I hit you in the face with the gun and break all the tiny bones in your ear. Keep on smoking, by the way. Good for you."

  The lady throws open the door and scurries out of the car like a cat that just got shot in the ass with a pellet rifle.

  Miriam lights her cigarette, slides over the seat divider, and throws the Subaru into drive.

  Her lungs fill with magic nicotine. Her foot stomps on the pedal.

  Movement. Sweet movement.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The Third and Final Hour

  No movement.

  Shitty, dead-fish-floating-in-the-water lack of movement.

  Miriam was cooking with gas. Then she reached the causeway crossing the Barnegat Bay and traffic locked up tighter than a handful of tampons crammed up a nun's asshole.

  Now it's car after car. Kayaks and boat trailers and pale yuppies and kids watching Spongebob Squarepants on DVD screens in the backs of the front seats. Even this late in the day, people are desperate for a taste of the beach, a whiff of sand and surf (the surf smelling like rotting mollusks and the sand home to old hypodermic needles and clumpy, filth-caked condoms). The sun has long faded, just a bleary smear against the dark clouds hovering above the island. It's like a line of tourists driving toward the Rapture.

  Miriam lays on the horn.

  The last cigarette from the pack is down to its nub. She grits her teeth and flicks it out the window, and it bounces off the hood of a silver mini-van next to her.

  The mother in the passenger seat – a blimpy hippo already sunburned so badly it looks like she's been wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights – shoots her a sour stare.

  Miriam thinks of shooting the woman back, with bullets.

  Miriam elbows the horn again. She's feeling claustrophobic. This is coming down to the wire. She's been sitting in traffic for far too long now.

  She needs a sign.

  "I need a sign," she says, panicked.

  "Here comes one," Louis says in the back seat. He peels up his electrical tape and reveals not a gaping socket as usual, but a ruined eye that looks more like a thumb-squished grape than anything else. For added effect, he winks.

  Then he's gone.

  Miriam desperately looks around to see what he's talking about.

  Sour, sunburned lady? No.

  Carload of dogs and screaming children in front of her? Probably not.

  A small plane flies overhead. But since she doesn't have any kind of Batman grappling hook on her belt, she thinks that plan is pretty much fucked from the get-go.
>
  Then she sees it.

  A biker – no, a cyclist.