Blackbirds

by Chuck Wendig

He's lean and ropy, dressed to the nines in red-and-blue spandex like he's the Superman of the bicycle crowd.

  As he whizzes past on the side of the causeway, Miriam throws open the passenger side door.

  His front tire meets unyielding resistance.

  The cyclist flies over the open door. She hears, but does not see, his head hit the pavement. At least he's wearing a helmet.

  Miriam's up and out of the car and on the bike before she even thinks about it. The front tire's bent a little from where it smacked into the Subaru's door, but even wobbly, it's locomotion.

  She checks the cell phone.

  She has less than an hour now.

  "My bike!" the cyclist cries.

  Miriam steers unsteadily past.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Frankie

  The Barnegat Lighthouse – Old Barney – stands ahead.

  The winding sandy path is hemmed in by a rickety post-andrail fence, which is itself hemmed in by black shrubs with yellow flowers.

  Gulls cackle and complain overhead, where black garlands of clouds look like distant bands of blackbirds.

  The tides rush in, rush out, an outlying murmur.

  Miriam steps over the yellow police tape that's meant to block people from going in, and she steps past the sign announcing "Under Construction" and another sign explaining that soon the lighthouse will be home to a new lantern and state-of-the-art polycarbonate windows.

  It feels like she's on a rollercoaster ride – cresting the hill, though no hill awaits. Her stomach is home to squirming eels. It expands and contracts. Sinks and swims.

  Her feet fall on sand that shifts beneath them. She sucks in a breath and kicks off her shoes. A sense of the inevitable precedes her, running ahead like an eager dog. She feels like she's a little girl forced to approach a mother who waits with a leather belt in hand.

  She walks.

  It feels like she's not approaching the lighthouse, but that it's approaching her.

  You can't change anything. Her own voice, not Louis's, chiding her in her head. Just remember that. You're not here to change anything. You're just here to bear witness. It's what you do. It's what you are. You're the war crow on the battlefield. The chooser of the slain.

  She reaches the end of the hedges. The sand path continues toward the lighthouse. The lighthouse has a white base, a brick red top.

  Frankie mills about outside. He's a tall drink of motor oil on the bright beach, a dark shape on an illuminated X-Ray, a long dark shadow in sympathy with the sky above. He paces. Rubs his nose. Itches his ear.

  Hairless, the man Harriet called Ingersoll, is nowhere to be seen.

  It's almost time. Miriam doesn't have to look at the cell phone to know it.

  But she pulls out the phone anyway. Gun in one hand, phone in the other, and diary tucked in her pants, she thumbs the redial button on the phone.

  Then she starts walking.

  Frankie's phone rings. It should. She's calling it.

  He answers, and she hears him in stereo – his voice on the phone and his voice ahead: "Harriet?"

  Miriam wings the phone at his head like a fucking boomerang. It whips hard across the bridge of his not-insignificant nose, and he staggers, blinking back tears.

  She thinks to shoot him, but – No. Ingersoll will hear the shot. Don't do it.

  Instead, she hurries up and drives the barrel of the gun deep into Frankie's solar plexus.

  "The solar plexus is a massive bundle of nerves," Miriam hisses.

  Frankie fumbles for his gun, but Miriam's knee to his wrist knocks it from his hand.

  As he wheezes, his face turning red, she chops him in the neck with the butt of the pistol.

  "Mastoid process triggers your gag reflex."

  True to her information, he doubles over, gagging. He doesn't dry heave; he vomits what looks like a half-digested hoagie.

  She wonders how she's going to kill him. Hunched over in a Sumo position, puking on himself, he's trying to crabwalk backward.

  Fuck it, she thinks. Strangle him to death.

  Miriam gets behind him and takes her gun arm and brings the crook of the elbow up under his throat. She pulls back hard enough to choke a pony –

  Frankie's an old man forty-two years from now, and he's sitting in a darkened theater with his grandson, and the boy is held rapt as his face is lit by whatever it is that's on the screen. The boy is beaming, and Frankie sees it, and then he lays his head back and rests his eyes and lets the heart attack that's been attacking him for the last six hours, working him over with dull pipe and crushing grip, finally take him. His mouth opens, gasping one last breath, and the boy doesn't notice; he just keeps watching.

  – and she lets go. Frankie, gasping, stumbles forward into his own hoagie bile.

  He tries to stand, but Miriam presses the gun to the back of his head.

  "You're going to be a grandfather someday," she says.

  "OK," he croaks, blinking back tears.

  "You don't really like this life, do you?"

  "No. Christ, no. I hate it."

  "You have the keys to the Escalade?"

  He nods.

  "Take them. Go to it. Get away. You don't want to be here."

  Another nod.

  "I see you again," she says, "I'll make sure you never get to be a grandfather."

  She moves past him and heads into the lighthouse as thunder tumbles over thunder, not far away now, but very close.

  FORTY

  Old Barney

  The lantern room is encased in glass – or, rather, some windows are glass, some have already been replaced with polycarbonate panes.

  They haven't yet replaced the lantern, though.

  Louis is bound to a wooden chair next to it. The lantern is a bulbous thing, like a giant insect's eye. Louis is held there by brown extension cords over hands and feet. His head is affixed to the base of the lantern by what seems to be a whole roll of electrical tape.

  Ingersoll plays with the rusty fillet knife. The scent of fish guts plays at his nose.

  He stole it from a fisherman asleep on a nearby jetty. Broke his neck, and let the poor fool crash into the surf – though not before snatching the knife from beneath his chair.

  Ingersoll rolls the bones that he empties from his satchel. They clatter across the lantern-room floor at his feet, and he sorts through them the way one might sort through dried beans looking for stones. His finger shifts the bones this way and that. Like he's reading them.

  He's not, of course. He can't read them. He does not possess his grandmother's gift of vision, not like he wants to. He pretends, sometimes, and this act of pretending is sometimes so good that he convinces himself.

  This time, he tries as hard as he can to see what will happen here.

  One of the windows above his head is broken. Wind keens through it.

  "A storm is coming," he says.

  His target, Louis, is still bleary-eyed, beaten and half-drugged. His head lolls as he stirs to some greater semblance of alertness.

  Ingersoll sighs. The bones are telling him nothing. Once more, as always, he must invent his own truth and direct his own future.

  "Why would I kill you?" he asks aloud. "You are meaningless to me. But you've seen my face. And my new employee, Miriam, is awfully fond of you, and this I cannot have. You will forever cloud her vision. She is mine, my friend. Not yours."

  He twirls the knife between gaunt fingers. "Besides. I enjoy causing you pain, and I am fond of the fact that Miriam has already seen this scene play out, hasn't she?"

  Ingersoll admires the knife. He smells the rusted, pitted blade.

  "Get away from me," Louis stammers. "Who are you? Who are you people? I don't have what you want!"

  "That no longer matters," Ingersoll says with a shrug.

  He moves fast – a coiled spring, unsprung. He stabs Louis in the left eye with the knife. It does not go to the brain and only ruins the eye, a choice the hairless man has made. Louis screams. The at
tacker withdraws the knife. It makes a sucking sound as he extracts it.

  His thin lips form a mirthless smile.

  The Barnegat Lighthouse has 217 steps.

  Each is an agony. Each a troubled birth, an expelled kidney stone, a black widow's bite.

  The steps are corrugated steel painted in flaking yellow. They wind in a tight spiral through a channel of black brick.

  It is like ascending the throat of some ancient creature.

  What she's going to behold plays out in Miriam's mind again and again like a YouTube video set to repeat. The broken window. The wind through the gap. The rusted knife. The sound of an eye being ruined. Her name, spoken by Louis in sadness and surprise.

  Again and again. An endless circle of steps and visions.

  Thunder again, outside. Muted through the brick. She wonders: Am I late? Is that the thunder that plays in my vision? When she witnesses a death for real, she often looks for these clues, these cues – visual, auditory, whatever. The honking of a car horn. A commercial on the television. Something somebody says.

  When she finally comes upon it, when she finally staggers into the lantern room to witness this tableau of horror, this shoebox diorama of death, she doesn't expect it.

  It takes her by surprise and steals her breath, even though she feels like all her life has been rushing toward this moment in one vacuum gasp.

  Ingersoll doesn't hear her coming, but when she arrives, he offers her little more than a flick of his gaze and the hint of an admiring smile.

  By the time Miriam steps into the lantern room, the knife tip is already in Louis's left eye. It's not buried to the hilt. Not yet. That's a killing blow. That comes next.

  It's good that she's here, he thinks. So she can see. She'll have the proof. It strikes him; he should have had her come here all along, to stand as witness to his glory and his cruelty.

  Louis sees her with his one good eye. Perfect.

  "Miriam?" he asks, but Ingersoll already has the knife out and is stabbing it into the trucker's second eye and brain.

  It happens so fast. After all this, it feels like it should happen leisurely, in slow motion.

  Things don't seem right.

  The gun in her hand feels warm.

  She smells something bitter, acrid. Smoke stings her eyes.

  Ingersoll holds the knife tight. His hand starts to shake.

  He turns and reaches up to touch the hole in his temple. A thin rivulet of blood dribbles down from the entry wound, like rusty water from a busted spigot.

  Louis blinks his good eye.

  He's not dead, Miriam thinks.

  This isn't how it happened in her vision. This isn't how it's supposed to play out.

  Her heart skips a beat. She feels sick. Woozy. Queasy. Greasy.

  The gun is in her hand. Her arm is extended.

  She drops the gun and it clatters against the floor.

  "I–" she starts to say, but she's truly at a loss for words.

  Ingersoll teeters.

  And then he lunges like a tiger, knife in hand.

  He's on her, his one hand closing on her throat with fingers like mandibles, and she's carried backward with the momentum. She slams against the metal steps, and she feels him go up over her, and then she goes up over him, and the world goes topsy-turvy. Black bricks and white lines smear into an abyssal spiral, and again and again she's greeted by a face full of hard yellow metal –

  Her muscles cry out, her bones feel chipped and cracked, and she thrusts each limb out from her body as hard as she can, and it slows her tumble –

  She comes to a stop about thirty feet down.

  Fresh blood marks the wall next to her.

  Beneath her, Ingersoll's eyes stare up.

  His head is cocked at an impossible angle, the chin tucked over the shoulder, the vertebrae pressing so hard against his hairless flesh that it looks like his neck will split like an overripe fruit. His dead gaze seems affixed to her. A painting whose eyes always watch.

  Miriam almost laughs.

  But laughing – even almost laughing – hurts. Real bad.

  She looks down and finds a rusty fishing knife sticking out of her chest. It goes clean through her left tit, right to the hilt.

  Miriam tries to draw a breath. It's like sucking in a lung full of fire.

  "Shit," she says.

  Darkness takes her, and she continues her tumble down the lighthouse spiral.

  INTERLUDE

  The Dream

  "Do you get it now?" Louis asks, walking alongside her.

  Together, they cross a black sand beach, each granule catching the sun in a way that makes it shimmer. The sand is warm beneath Miriam's feet. A tide licks at the shoreline. The air smells salty, but not briny or fishy.

  "I get that I'm dead, and thank Jesus this doesn't look like Hell."

  "You're not dead," Louis says, itching at one of the black Xs across his eyes. "Though, I should note that you are dying."

  "Great. So this is some kind of mid-surgery fever dream. Just show me the light already so I can go running toward it."

  "You're missing the point."

  "I am?"

  "You are. Think about it. What just happened?"

  She really does have to think, because she'd rather not look back. She'd rather just be here, in the now, on this beach. In the bright sun.

  It doesn't take too long, though, for her to remember.

  "I beat the game," she says.

  "You did," Louis answers.

  "For once, it didn't happen like it was supposed to. It almost did. But I changed it."

  "You sure did. Spectacularly so. Good job."

  "Thanks." She smiles then. For real. Not a half-smile, not a bitter smirk, not a snarky grin, but a real, can't-stop-it-fromspreading smile. "I don't know what I did differently. I sure tried real hard. Maybe it's because I love you. Or him. I guess you're not him."

  Louis's smile fades. "I'm not him, and you're still not getting it. You know why it happened. You know how you broke the cycle."

  "I don't! I really don't."

  "Want a hint?"

  "I want a hint."

  She blinks, and Louis is now her mother. Pinched face, small, puckered body.

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

  Then, poof – back to Louis with the X-eyes.

  "I still don't–"

  No, wait. Yes, yes she does.

  "I killed somebody."

  Louis snaps his fingers. "Ding, ding, ding. Give this girl a panda."

  Miriam stops walking. Clouds drift in front of the sun. Somewhere out over the water, a storm brews, and rain clatters against the tides.

  "I'm usually just the… the messenger. The vulture picking at the bones. But not this time. This time, I… I changed things. I killed Ingersoll."

  "You balanced the scales. The scales always want to be balanced. You want to make a change, a big change, a change so cosmic you're unwriting death and kicking fate square in the face, then you best be prepared to pay for it."

  "With blood," Miriam says, her mouth dry, her bones cold. Lightning licks at the ocean way out there under the steel sky. "With blood and bile and voided bowels."

  "Who are you?" Her voice is quiet.

  "Don't you mean, what am I?"

  She doesn't respond.

  Louis again becomes her mother. Then he becomes Ben Hodge, the back of his head blooming like a bloody orchid. Then Ashley, hopping in place on one foot.

  Then back to Louis.

  "Maybe I'm fate," he says. "But maybe, just maybe, I'm the opposite of fate, the way that God has His opposite in the Devil. Maybe I'm just you, just the voices in your head."

  He grins wide. His teeth are each little skulls.

  "One thing I do know, though. We've got so much more for you to do."

  "We?" she asks, her heart frozen –

  FORTY-ONE

  Fate's Foer />
  She gasps awake, feeling like she's tangled in seaweed. She starts tugging off the choking weeds – the ones that wormed their way down her throat, the ones that have burrowed into her arm and chest – and suddenly there's all this beeping, some fast, some slow, some a steady drone, and the world swims into view just as an antiseptic stink crawls into her nose, nests there, and has babies.