Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  “Closure,” she says. “I am a big fan of closure. I close things all the time. I close doors and windows and jam jars and circuits and captions. I even closed my mouth once.”

  “Just once?”

  “Just once. Never again.”

  He laughs. A soft, gentle sound. He’s gone a little gray around the temples. Black hair peppered with iron filings. And he’s scruffy, too— a beard coming in. She remarked on it when they first sat down, and he said Samantha—“Sam”— liked beards a lot, so, ta-da, growing a beard.

  “You’re still Miriam,” he says.

  “In the flesh.” Don’t kill him. Don’t kill yourself. Don’t burn this place down. Deep breath. She draws that deep breath in through her nose. The coffee smell fills her. Soothes her (a little). “But I’m trying to change that.”

  “You? Change?”

  “Mm-hmm. Yep. Me Miriam. Me change.” She pulls out a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes. “See these? Last cigarettes I am ever going to smoke.”

  “Going cold turkey?”

  She whistles. “The coldest of turkeys. This turkey will be frozen solid with liquid nitrogen and whacked with a sledgehammer.”

  “That’s a pretty big change.”

  She nods. “It is. And I’m running now.”

  “Running from what?”

  “Har, har. Like, running-running. For exercise.”

  His mouth forms an “O.” “Who are you and what have you done with Miriam Black?”

  “Miriam Black is trying to find a future for herself. A future in which she hopefully will not speak of herself in the third person.”

  “Why now?”

  She sighs. Does she get into this? Easier just to say some twee, sarcastic shit and drop that mic like a hot potato. But she’s trying to do differently. Trying to do better. And she figures if there’s ever any chance of getting Louis back . . .

  Finally, she says: “Because it’s possible. Because now there’s this . . . itty-bitty twinkling light out there. And I’m reaching for it, man. Like a kid grabbing at a firefly.” She thrusts out her chin, feels the iron filings in her spine line up, magnetized. “I told you, I’m going to get rid of this curse.”

  Even now, her whole body clenches at the thought. She needs it to be gone, but part of her (and not a small part of her, either) wants it to stay. Just looking around, she knows how three people in this place are going to die. The doe-eyed girl behind the counter: skin cancer in fifty-two years. The scraggly old hippie who handed Miriam her drink: he’s on a moped when a pickup truck wipes him out, and what’s left is a crashed, smashed remix of blood and meat and blue pastel metal. The old woman with the too-red lipstick by the front, the one Miriam bumped elbows with on accident (“on accident,” wink wink): lung cancer, already settled into her crinkled-up tissue-paper body, dead in two years.

  These visions are a part of her. She’s a knitted scarf shot through with yarn made from dead hair and red veins. They’ve been a part of her for a long while— but now, she’s worried that it’s going bigger than that.

  That they’re becoming her, or she’s becoming them.

  Something bigger, weirder, worse.

  Like, soon: this is all she’ll be. Just a rock in place to break the river. Her only goal and desire to bat away the reaper’s scythe. Fate’s foe.

  Fuck that.

  She wants more for herself. Or less. Or just something different.

  They talk for a while longer. But it’s awkward, erratic, like the two of them are walking around on stilts and trying to look normal. And when they leave, there’s this shallow, shitty little hug, this faint embrace as if between two people who will never see each other again, and when he’s gone, Miriam sits for a while still and finishes her coffee. Then she goes into the bathroom and sobs into the sink and elbows a dent in the paper towel dispenser.

  SIXTEEN

  LIGHTNING CALLS, THUNDER ANSWERS

  Miriam doesn’t say anything.

  The man on the other end speaks.

  “Miriam?” the man asks. Same man she spoke to out there in the desert. As she stood there over the body of Steven McArdle. Same drawn-out drawl, slow as cold molasses. How does he know my name? She waits, says nothing. “Miriam, if you’re there, I want you to listen.”

  “You have the wrong number,” she says. She thinks: Just hang up.

  “You have my friend’s phone.”

  “Your friend tried to kill me—”

  “And I can appreciate that. I don’t want to hurt you. But there are some things I need, Miriam. I’d like that phone back, for starters. Pistol, too, though these are not essential. What I want is Isaiah.”

  “I don’t know any Isaiah.” Not a lie.

  “I want the boy back.”

  “The boy.” He must mean the little kid in the Superman shirt. From the Subaru. Miriam feels her pulse quicken. “Well, you can’t have him.”

  “His mother is dangerous. He’s better with us. We want him back.”

  Us? “Well, people in Hell want Popsicles, dude. I am sorry that I cannot accommodate. Now, I don’t know who the fuck you are—”

  “I’d come and find you, Miriam, so we could have this chat in person. But your friend here won’t tell me where you are. We got your name out of him in a moment of great pain, but everything else— he’s really bearing down. He does you great honor. You must really be special.”

  “My friend? I don’t know who you’re—”

  A bellow of pain comes out of the phone. At first she doesn’t recognize it, can’t decipher an identity in the gargled scream, until that scream dissolves into two words: “Miriam! Run!”

  It’s Wade. From the gas station. The tow truck driver.

  Gabby watches as Miriam’s voice goes a mile a minute: “You listen to me; Wade isn’t my friend. He doesn’t know me, I don’t know him. He can’t help you, so just leave him the fuck alone—”

  “He knows where you are. Got a receipt here for a tow. Means he took you somewhere, dropped you off. And yet he won’t tell us. That’s no matter how much we”—here a sound like a sack of flour dropped on a hard floor, followed by a yelp and bleat from Wade—“try to persuade him.”

  “Let him go. Just let him go.”

  “Tell me where you and Isaiah are. And we let him go.”

  The words spill out of her like dice out of a gambler’s cup. “Whoa, whoa, wait, I don’t really have the boy. Okay? His mom took him. Ran off. Left me there. You’re digging up dead ground here, so just—”

  “One more chance, Miriam. Where are you? Where is the boy?” A murmur of voices in the background. One of them a woman. Then Wade screams again. “Last chance. Last chance to do the right thing, Miriam.”

  Her lips form the words. The words that would give away the motel name. The room number. Everything. But she looks over at Gabby— her face crisscrossed with scars, her eyes wide and fearful. She thinks about how close she is. She can about reach out and touch a lock of Mary Scissors’ hair now—

  Wade is helping her out. She doesn’t deserve it. He doesn’t know her. They’re not friends. He’s just a guy, she’s just a girl. He’s the mark, she’s the con.

  She could help him out now. Could save him the way he’s trying to save her. But she tells herself: He doesn’t die. They can’t kill him. She’s seen his death and this isn’t it. Miriam never asked this guy to stand up for her.

  So, instead, what she says into the phone is:

  “Your right thing isn’t my right thing.”

  The man on the other end groans low in his throat. He sighs. “I’m sorry to hear that, Miriam. But you should know: there’s a storm coming. I fear you’re about to get swept up like trash in a bad wind. I’m sorry about your friend here.”

  She starts to scream for him to wait. Miriam begins babbling, telling him again that she can’t help him, but maybe if they sat down, they could figure it out—

  But she’s yelling into a dead phone.

  Nobody’s the
re. The man hung up.

  Miriam screams.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  THE SCORPION AND THE FROG

  SEVENTEEN

  NIE MÓJ CYRK, NIE MOJE MALPY

  A gulf separates them now. Last night, Gabby insisted on knowing what was going on, and Miriam wouldn’t tell her. All Miriam would say was how that guy she mentioned yesterday, the ex-Army guy, the interrogator, he told her this Polish phrase, this idiom, that goes:

  Not my circus, not my monkeys.

  Meaning, not my problem. Not my business.

  And that’s what she said to Gabby. It’s not my circus, not my monkeys. And it’s not yours, either. Of course Gabby persisted, in part because she actually foolishly cares and in part because the thread is off the sweater and who wouldn’t want to pull it? But Miriam pushed back, and pushed back harder than she meant:

  “Just go the fuck to sleep. Okay?”

  Lights out. Bed. And now, Miriam is sleeping for shit. She feels dried up— the air here thin and hungry, like it’s sucking all the life out of her. She tosses. She turns. Gabby sleeps rolled over, back to her.

  All night, Miriam lies there, eyes open. Imagining what they did to Wade— that dumb fucker who went to bat for a woman he barely knew, a woman who gave him hell, a woman who didn’t deserve the kindness he granted her in the face of some kind of torture.

  The best comfort she manages is to remember that she knows things.

  She knows how Wade dies.

  And it happens when he’s sixty-three.

  When it happens, he doesn’t look scarred up, like Gabby. Looked like he still had all his fingers, all his face parts.

  It’s the coldest of comfort, and it makes her feel no less shitty.

  But she repeats to herself in the faintest whisper there in the dark: “Not my circus, not my monkeys. Not my circus, not my monkeys.”

  Whatever that is— the coming storm, the man on the phone, the boy in the Superman shirt with the crazy-ass gun-toting mother— it’s not her problem. The world is full of awfulness. Lines of blood and bones and ash crisscrossing each other. She doesn’t have to be at every intersection. A bird pecking at the dead.

  I can be free.

  She tries to close her eyes.

  Then she hears a scuttling sound. A scritch-a-scratch. She thinks: It’s nothing. Just the motel room air conditioner being an asshole. A little bang, a little rattle, a little skitter-scrape. But then something lands on her face—

  Something with little legs.

  She sits up suddenly, crying out. Whatever’s on her face falls off and lands in her open hands—

  A dark, small shape.

  She knows what it is. Her eyes adjust— the meager light from the front windows of the motel room showing the tiny legs, the flat and almost headless body, the curve of its tail.

  The scorpion hurries off. Disappearing under the covers.

  Miriam feels dizzy.

  Somewhere in the distance: sirens screaming.

  She looks up.

  The ceiling squirms.

  Scorpions. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Hanging upside-down, crawling on the ceiling, the fan, in the corners of the room. Little legs going ticky ticky ticky. Whisper-click, scuttle-flick. Lights from a truck outside highlight their glistening backs, yellow and opaque, an infected color—

  And a body hangs there with them. A human shape. Writhing under the carpet of crawling arachnids. They part. Louis leers down. Eyeless. Mouth opens. Scorpions rain from inside his mouth, from within the hollow puckers—

  They drop against her, and she brushes them off, and she grits her teeth and thinks, This is a dream, it’s not real, don’t freak out—

  Louis says, his words choked around swarming scorpions:

  “The poison’s in you, Miriam. You can’t purge it now.”

  A stinger sticks in the back of her hand—

  She lurches off the bed, feet tangling in the sheets—

  Face first into the carpet. Stars behind her eyes. Her legs kick free of the sheets and she gets her feet under her—

  Sunlight streams in through the window.

  Gabby sits at the edge of the bed, flicking through channels on the TV. She looks over and says with no love, “Wondering when you’d wake your ass up.”

  Miriam tries to talk but her voice is like two pieces of porous stone grinding together— sparks and a dry brushfire burning in the well of her chest. She coughs. Rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Time izzit?”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “Oh.”

  She looks down on the floor, sees the two halves of the unsmoked cigarette from last night mashed into the carpet. Nits of tobacco speckling her one knee.

  Gabby ignores her.

  The channels go flip, flip, flip. Strobe-light images: A woman with a knife chopping herbs. A smiling celebrity on some smiling celebrity talk show. Someone painting a wall. A dead hooker and TV detectives standing over her. A cartoon goat chasing a cartoon donkey. A gas station fire. A game show—

  Miriam says, “Wait. Go back.”

  There. The gas station fire.

  Her heart stops.

  All parts of her feel like they’re floating away— muscle from bone, skin from muscle, skin cells from skin cells, all her molecules sheared from one another as she is dispersed like a cloud of particulate matter in a hard wind.

  It’s the Chevron. Out at the edge of the reservation.

  On the news they’re saying they have a body, a body they believe to be that of the attendant— and son of the owners—Wade Chee. Burned alive in the blaze. They’re hauling him out—covered up on a gurney, one charred hand dangling out.

  “No no no no,” Miriam says, lurching toward the television and fixing her gaze upon it. “This isn’t possible. There are rules. There are rules.”

  One of those rules is she’s never wrong.

  Death is death. When she sees it, it’s a fixed point in space—a thumbtack in the map that only she can move.

  “Miriam, what are you—”

  “Someone else moved the thumbtack.”

  “What?”

  “Someone else is changing the rules. That guy dies— or was supposed to die— decades from now. Not last night. Not like this. Which means . . .” She searches for it. Which means what, exactly? It’s not Wade. Or someone else is like her: someone else can break the bones of how this thing works. Or, the worst possibility of them all: Miriam’s been wrong this whole time. The rules she thought were the rules never were. Just a delusion. A comforting lie.

  She starts to hyperventilate. All parts of her are suffused suddenly with desperate desire. Cigarette. Louis. A drink. The white dashes on the highway flicking past as she runs far, far away. Her mother. God, really? Her mother? And yet there it is: she wants to see her mother again, wants to share a glass of that too sweet crème de menthe, wants to share a cigarette— and oh, hey, now it’s all gone full circle again and the nic-fit storms through her like a spooked horse.

  Teeth bite lip. What fingernails she has dig into her palms.

  You killed him.

  You killed Wade Chee.

  A gentle hand finds her arm. Gabby. “Miriam. You okay?”

  “I’m about five hundred miles past okay.”

  “What happened? Who is this man?”

  Miriam says: “He’s the one who drove me here. From the desert. That’s it. He’s nobody. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him.” She grits her teeth, makes an animal sound. “I’m like poison, Gabs. You gotta get away from me. Or you’ll end up worse than you were before.”

  She’s suddenly on the edge of the confessional. Teetering, tottering, like she’s ready to tell Gabby: You die soon, too, Gabs. You eat a bunch of pills because life grinds your pencil all the way down to the eraser and because you think you’re ugly and nobody loves you and I wish I could stop it but—

  She bites that back.

  Too many self-fulfilling pro
phecies.

  But there, a tiny glimmer of hope: If I can be wrong about Wade Chee, maybe I can be wrong about Gabby.

  Whatever. Fuck it all.

  She needs to be done with this. The curse, closed off, sealed away and bricked off like that guy in the Poe story. The Cask of C’mon-I’m-Fucking-Done-With-This-Shit-tillado.

  Miriam stands upright, like a prairie dog at the hole sensing danger. She starts throwing on clothes. Her hair mussed, everything rumpled, situation normal, all fucked up. “I’m going to the courthouse.”

  “Right now? Why?”

  “Because,” Miriam seethes, “because, because, because! Because I need this over with. I want to be done with all of it. And whatever happened with that guy at the gas station— it’s all part of it. All part of the curse. I want it gone and I want it gone now. No time like the present.”

  Gabby hesitates. “I’ll call a cab. We’ll both go.”

  “No.” That word, spoken too harshly, too sharply— the word sharpened like a prison shiv. Miriam tries to soften it: “Gabby, no. You gotta get away from me.”

  “Bullshit. If you’re going, I’m coming.”

  “This is dangerous.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Miriam barks a dead laugh. “Jesus, Gabs, it means you could get hurt. And I can’t hack the idea of you getting hurt any more than you already have.” The words Have you seen your face? That’s my fault almost come launching full-tilt boogie out of her mouth, but she quickly recalls them before her vocal cords can make the sound.

  “I’m coming. We’ll go to Tucson together. You go to the courthouse. I’ll . . . get us another room somewhere. We have the money. We didn’t have to pay that scuzzy prick. If they don’t take cash, I’ll use my card.”

  Miriam’s about to protest and say that they could use the stolen card from the dead man in the desert. But that created the trail that led the bad man to burn down Wade Chee’s gas station— with Wade in it. Reluctantly, Miriam nods. “But you don’t have to do this. I told you, none of this was on you.”

  “I’m in this. I’ve kept the trip together so far, haven’t I?”