Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  She heads inside. The floor is cracked and buckled. Red dust and loose rocks kick about. A few shelves here and there. A freezer in the back. No air conditioning running— just metal fans blowing, streamers tied to the cages.

  Behind the counter, a young guy stands, skin the color of an old penny. Lean and lanky, like a Slim Jim. Long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, nose like a broken eagle’s beak, mouth a grim line.

  She plods in through the door, the bell doing its ding-a-ling thing. He gives her a quick look, then looks back down at whatever magazine he’s reading— but then, time for a double take. His head lifts again and this time he surveys her with a curious mix of worry and amusement.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Peachy,” she says, and she hears her voice is so thick with sarcasm, it’s practically dripping all over the floor.

  “You look like a piece of meat that’s been left in the oven too long.”

  She leans up against the counter, less to get close to it and more because she’s legit afraid she might fall. “That’s sweet. I bet you say that to all the girls.” Her whole face throbs like a stubbed toe. She drums her fingers. “I need water. Like, I need water now. Like, give me water, or I’ll kill you with my mind.”

  He grunts, scowls, then points. “They’re in the little case to your right.”

  Miriam looks down, and sure enough: a hip-high refrigerator, humming. It’s so far. Okay, sure, it’s like . . . three feet, but right now that feels like miles. She asks, “Can you get it for me?” But he just gives her a look like she’s a whackaloon fresh from the cracker factory, so she sighs, makes a long ugh sound, then stoops to get a bottle of water. She hangs there at the fridge for a moment, the door open, the cold air washing over her.

  “I would straight up fuck a snowman right now,” she says. “Just to cool down.” She wrenches the cap off the water with her teeth, then spits the cap onto the floor. She guzzles water. Throat full. It almost shocks her. She urps, tries not to puke. Pushing past it, she keeps drinking until the bottle is empty.

  “You need to close the fridge—”

  “Like, it wouldn’t be for love. It’d just be cheap, tawdry snowman sex— I’d basically be, like, a snow hooker.” She tilts the empty bottle, lets the last drops hit her tongue. “He could stick his carrot nose wherever he wanted. I’d give him the greatest snowjob of his life.” Her knee nudges the fridge shut, but not before she reaches in and fetches a second water bottle. “Get it? Snowjob?”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “What is wrong with you?” she asks. She realizes it’s not the best comeback, but at this point? It’s all she’s got.

  He just shakes his head, goes to ring her up. “That it?”

  “Yeah.”

  But then she sees.

  “Wait,” she says.

  Behind him, racks upon racks of cigarettes.

  And boy howdy, they’re fucking cheap. She feels like a kid in a candy store. Or a teenager looking at his first porno mag. Which treat to choose? Her whole body sings an eager song, and every molecule inside her body joins the chorus of want need smoke nicotine tar cancer sweet cancer oh, god, put it in me— and suddenly she has this weird image of her post coitus with a snowman in a ratty motel bed, and they’re both smoking, and he’s melting, and she’s breathing out frosty breath and puffs of cancer and the desire for it lives in her salivary glands. A dog drooling at the sound of a match striking.

  He follows her gaze. “What do you want? Brand? Pack or carton?”

  “They’re so . . . cheap.”

  “You’re on a reservation. No tax.”

  “Oh, man. Can I be an Indian?”

  “Not how it works.” He shrugs. “And I think we’re called First People now. Just let me know what you want.”

  “I want . . .” Her mouth forms the start of many answers: Marlboro, Camel, American Spirit, so many choices it paralyzes her. And then the words that come out of her mouth are: “I’m quitting.” The two words spoken slowly, sluggishly, like she’s having a stroke in the middle of saying them. Iiiiii’m quiiiiittiiiiing. Her eyes squeeze shut and she buries her face in her hands. Behind her hands, she spits out: “I’m-quitting-smoking-and-so-I-will-not-buy-cigarettes goddamnit shit fuck fuck shit.”

  “Okay. Whatever.”

  She bares her teeth like a rabid badger. “Don’t whatever me, fucker. I am caught in the throes of a permanent nic-fit and even one whiff of horseshit from anybody right now and I will tear your head off your neck and stick cigarettes in all of your face-holes and smoke them through you all at once.”

  He stares. “You have to go. Just take the water.”

  “I need a ride.”

  “So, go get a ride.”

  “Call me a cab.”

  He frowns. “No cab gonna get you out here.”

  “Then you need to drive me.”

  “I need to—  Look around. It look like anybody else is here?”

  “No. And no customers, either. That tow truck work?”

  He sighs. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll pay.”

  “How much?”

  She brought no money of her own. But the dead man had cash. “Forty bucks do you?”

  “Where you headed?”

  “About twenty minutes east. Miami.” There she thinks: what irony. From Miami, Florida, to Miami, Arizona. One a glitzy neon-smeared monstrosity sitting on the water. The other a landlocked nowhere copper town.

  “Gimme fifty bucks and I’ll do it.”

  “I don’t have fifty. I have forty.”

  He shrugs. “Oh, well.”

  Miriam represses a growl.

  Then she thinks, well, the dead man had more than cash.

  “You take credit?” she asks.

  NINE

  BLOOM SOON

  The truck rumbles as it rolls down the road, the whole thing rattling like an old airplane breaking apart as it lands. Occasionally, the truck shudders and bangs, the tow hook on the back swinging and creaking.

  Out there, in the scrub, massive cacti stand tall— like guards standing vigil over a dead world.

  “They’ll bloom soon.”

  “Huh?” she asks.

  The driver tilts his head. “The cactus. The saguaro.” Sah-WAH-ro, the way he says it. “Soon they’ll bloom. Big, pretty-ass flowers on top. Then red fruit. You can eat the fruit, I guess, but the birds usually get to them first.”

  Miriam turns toward him. Looks him up and down. “What do you know about birds?”

  “They shit on my truck.” He points to a pasty white splotch at the top corner of his windshield— the patch seeded with some kind of small dark seeds.

  “No, I mean . . .” She turns all the way into it now, committed to the conversation. “What do you know about, like, people who can become birds? Or . . . you know, they can sort of telepathically enter the minds of birds.”

  He laughs, then looks. His smile falls away like a bone dropped by a confused dog. “You’re serious.”

  “Yeah. What of it?”

  “It’s a crazy-ass question, is what.”

  “Well, I just figured—”

  “Figured what? That I’m a fuckin’ Indian and know magical shit?”

  “No! No.” She pauses. Then clears her throat. “So, to clarify, that means you don’t know magical shit?”

  “Oh, oh, hold on, lemme pull over and go find some Brother Peyote, and he and I can go on a journey to ask Great Spirit about all the mysteries of the universe, including weird white-ass bitches who want to know how they become birds and whatever.” He makes a pssh sound and waves her off.

  “That’s cultural appropriation, dude.”

  “What?”

  “Calling me and my kind bitches. That’s our word.”

  “Don’t blow this back on me. You probably think my name is, like, Geronimo Running Squirrel or something.”

  “Chief Two-Bears Wampumdick?”

  “That’s my cousin
.”

  She snorts, laughing. “Okay. Good one.”

  “Yeah.” He looks angry, but then he laughs, too. “Girl. You a trip. My name’s Wade Chee. I’m not a drunk. I don’t own a casino. I don’t know fuck-all about birds or magic or any of that. Whenever I want to answer life’s great mysteries, I ask my iPhone. End of story.”

  “My name’s Miriam.” She sticks out her hand. This feels familiar. In a truck. With a stranger. Hand out, fingers eager for that sweet psychic tickle, that taste of death she knows she wants but that she needs to escape— it’s almost tangible, this desire to suddenly have his hand in hers and to see how and when he’s going to die. But he just laughs it off.

  “Your hands look a little fucked up. I’m good.”

  She turns her palm toward her— abraded from falling on the highway. “Oh. Yeah.” Touch me. Let me see.

  “This is you,” he says, gesturing by way of tilting his chin. Ahead: AMERICA’S BIG-VALU MOTEL. The sign itself a big fake American flag, the stars and stripes burned out in dead neon. Below it a smaller sign: TV! POOL! KITCHENETTE!

  “This is me.”

  “That credit card you gave me. Wasn’t in your name.”

  “Did you just figure that out? Think my name was really Steven?”

  He shrugs. “He your husband?”

  “No. I stole the card.”

  “You’re honest.”

  “I can also see how people are going to die when I touch them. And I can, once in a while when the chips are really fucking down, telepathically enter the mind of a bird and make it do things.”

  “You’re high.”

  She shrugs. “I really, really wish.”

  He puts out his hand. “Okay, okay. Tell me.”

  “Really?” His hand is long— a narrow palm with knobby, bony fingers. The nails chewed. The skin cracked. She takes his hand and feels the desert dryness—

  He feels cold but the fever eats him up like a fire gobbling ice, everything melting down, waves of cold washing over boiling water, and the flu he had has gone, given way to pneumonia, and old Wade, now sixty-three, rolls over to the side of his bed and starts coughing again— a gargling, howling cough, his lungs bucking like a train going too fast down narrow-gauge mountain tracks, and then it all just stops— his lungs catch, his heart stops, everything feels like a pimple pinched between thumb and forefinger and—

  She pulls her hand away. His raspy fingertips hiss against hers.

  “How old are you, Wade?” she asks.

  “Thirty.”

  “You got another thirty-three years on this earth. Then a flu-and-pneumonia combo knocks your ass into the grave.”

  He shrugs, like it doesn’t matter, or like he doesn’t believe. “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s been interesting, at least.” He laughs again.

  “See you, Wade.”

  And then she’s out. The tow truck rattles off. The motel awaits— a mud-colored rectangle, like a bunch of shoeboxes shoved together. Pair of dead fat-bellied palm trees out front. A rusted swing set off to the side. No swings, just the frames.

  Dead ahead is room six. Her room.

  She doesn’t have the key anymore— Gracie took the key ring on which it hung. But that’s okay. Because Miriam has someone on the inside.

  Deep breath. Long sigh. A body wracked by want— for a cigarette, for seven cigarettes, for a touch of death, for a person to be on the other side of the door that isn’t. She goes to room six. She knocks.

  Gabby answers.

  INTERLUDE

  FLORIDA

  Then.

  Miriam, by the sea. With a phone. It’s time. She calls Louis.

  He does not answer, but she leaves him a message. “It’s me. I love you. I need you. And you’re going to help me get rid of my curse. Call me back. Did I mention I love you? I love you. I love, love, love you.”

  She sits. And smokes. And waits for him to call her back.

  And just as the sun dips below the horizon and is gone, he does.

  “Miriam,” he says. His voice sounds small and faraway.

  “Louis! Louis. I love you. I need you. I think I found a way forward— I know! I know.” As she speaks, she paces, her cigarette hand doing all these wild drunken butterfly movements in the air, the ember swirling, ash falling like snow. “I get it. This is all . . . this is all crazy, and I know I’m the one who left you, and I told you not to follow, but things have changed, and I see a way out—”

  “Miriam, I’m getting married.”

  Wind whips. A salt spray from the sea peppers her face.

  “Wh . . . what?” She feels like a rag wringing itself out. All of who she is and all of what she hoped for spattering out onto the floor beneath her. “I don’t get it.”

  “I met somebody. Her name’s Samantha. We’re engaged.”

  TEN

  THE CICATRIX IN ROOM SIX

  “You look like Hell,” Gabby says, and Miriam’s first thought is perhaps not as repulsive as her brain gets, but in the moment, it’s pretty rotten— she thinks, looking at Gabby’s scarred-up face, following the slashes and intersections of puffy pink scar tissue carved into the young woman by Ashley Gaynes, You’re one to talk. And it’s right there that Miriam knows that if she does indeed look like Hell, it’s because that’s where she is one day headed.

  If I’m not already here, her brain adds cheerfully.

  Miriam gives a shrug and a half-smile (one pickled in the guilt of her own mental treachery) and slides past Gabby. Patting the young woman on the shoulder as she goes, which is, like, a super-condescending move, but it happens. Too late to take it back now. Maybe someone has that psychic ability, but it ain’t Miriam. It’s just, the thing is—

  The thing is, Gabby feels fragile.

  Miriam knows that in about three years, Gabby will go into her bathroom, eat a water bison’s weight in pills, and then go lie down and die.

  She will do this because her face is ruined.

  It’s not ruined. Not really. The pieces are fucked up, maybe, but just because you break a pretty vase doesn’t mean it isn’t still beautiful. (Hell, Miriam of all people appreciates broken things more than others.) Even now, no makeup, just yoga pants and a pink pajama tank top, she’s still a sight to behold: blond hair in careless peaks, black-rim specs, tattoos on her arm of shipwrecks and mad krakens. The scars don’t change that. But Gabby won’t hear a word of it. She thinks the cracks in her facade have made her unlovable.

  And Miriam isn’t helping on that front. Gabby wants them to be together. And Miriam resists.

  Because of Louis.

  And because she’s a radioactive milkshake you don’t want to drink.

  And because getting close to Gabby means probably breaking Gabby further— as she’s already done— and hooking up just means Gabby is exposed. And that’s what Gabby doesn’t need. That girl’s heart needs to be buried deep. Wreathed in gristle and mounded beneath calluses. That little Care Bear needs to harden right the fuck up. Maybe then, with some steel in her spine, Gabby will decide— on that dreadful day three years hence— to leave the caps on the pill bottles. To say yes to life. To deny death.

  It won’t happen.

  It’ll never happen.

  What fate wants, fate gets. Can’t untie that rope.

  Gabby’s a dead woman. Time just hasn’t caught up to her yet.

  “I gotta shower,” Miriam says.

  “Wait, don’t you want to talk?”

  “Yes. No. Not right now. Shower first. Then . . .” She sighs. Beholds the desert motel around them: it’s clownishly ugly. Gold paisley walls. Red bedspread. Darker red carpet. Couple of chairs the color of turquoise jewelry. It’s like a clown ate a bunch of motley, multicolored handkerchiefs, then took a shit everywhere. She’s not some kinda fashion Nazi or anything, but this room offends her on a fundamental level. “We still have the . . . thing tonight, the meeting, and I feel gross.”

 
Gabby’s saying something else, something about the meeting, but Miriam can’t hear her— she’s too lost in her own thoughts. All of what happened is now rushing up— a gauntlet of fists sucker-punching her. Gracie. The little boy. The sniper— now dead, his taste still in Miriam’s mouth like licking pennies. The phone call, the desert sun, Wade’s lungs thick with pneumonia—

  The shower, she keeps cold. If she could make it dump ice on her, she would. It shocks her, steals her breath. Perfect.

  Her mind turns the morning’s events over again and again. Like a stone in her mouth, rolled from tongue to teeth to pocket of cheek and back again.

  Someone was trying to kill the woman, steal the child.

  Miriam was incidental to that. A perpendicular line intersecting a problem that isn’t hers. It’s not my problem. I have my own. And yet she can feel the Trespasser behind her in the shower, breath on her neck—

  You’re not done yet.

  She spins around. Nobody there.

  The curtain slides back, rings rattling on the bar.

  Gabby steps in—

  She sucks in a sharp breath as the cold water hits her body. She ducks her head under it. Water cascades down over her hair and she runs her fingers through it. Then she’s back up and says to Miriam, “Hey.”

  “Yeah. Hey. What, ahh, is this?”

  “This?”

  “This. You in the shower with me. This.”

  “Figured we could save water.” Gabby steps closer. Only an inch between them now. “Do a solid for the environment.”

  “I don’t care about the environment,” Miriam says. She feels an eagerness in her legs, her hips— she wants to step forward. So, step forward already. Instead, she does what she does best: keeps talking. “Frankly, the sooner we enter that period of global heat death and we can drown this rat in boiling seawater—”

  Gabby takes another step. Skin on skin now. She’s just a bit taller, so it’s like her breast fits just over Miriam’s— like they’re a puzzle that actually fits. The water travels between them where it can. In liminal spaces fast collapsing.

  “Shut up and kiss me,” Gabby says. It comes out as a plea— a desperate entreaty with a ragged edge, hungry and coyote-mad.