Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  And the ranger— a woman with a dour, sour-milk face and red hair pulled back in a no-nonsense, zero-fuckery ponytail— said rather humorlessly, “They have genetically engineered mice to grow human ears, you know.”

  Miriam explained that this was gross and the ranger ruined a perfectly good joke. The ranger shrugged and continued on her litany of titmice talk: blah blah blah, they’re friendly birds, they might even eat out of your hand, they sometimes flock with birds of other kinds like chickadees, juncos, flickers, woodpeckers, and nuthatches. Miriam snorted at woodpeckers, and then lost it at nuthatches, at which point the ranger encouraged Miriam to either go out and enjoy the state park there in Chattanooga or leave the park.

  All that from asking: I want to go bird-watching, so— what kind of birds should I be looking for here?

  Because it was time to practice.

  Now she’s here, in the park. Surrounded by tall oaks and warm September air. A stream pops and bubbles nearby, carving a narrow channel between some rocks. She’s been walking now for . . . what? An hour? Nobody around. Blue sky. Beautiful day. Nothing can ruin it. She just needs to find a bird and . . .

  Sure enough, there, on a nearby stump— a stump as tall as she is, a stump that sits crooked like a hooked finger— sits a titmouse.

  Big black eyes. Tiny head shoved into its plump soup-dumpling body. An ostentatious tuft of feathers sticking from the top of its head like a nasty case of just-been-fucked-in-a-gas-station-bathroom hair.

  The bird whistles and whoostles and chirps.

  Stupid, cute little jerk.

  Miriam is not one to be drawn in by cuteness— it is, after all, a trap. A trap engineered by nature so that you want to take care of such ittle-bittle-widdle critters, or at least so that you don’t ditch them in a hole somewhere. Small head and big eyes? A ruse. A clever, careful, evolutionary ruse.

  And she feels herself getting suckered in.

  She wants to whistle back. She wants to hold it because the feathery little dum-dum looks cute as all fuck. If she could, she would reach out and grab it and hug it and squeeze it until it pops like a grape.

  The desire to hug adorable things until they are dead is strange, she decides. Best not to shine a light in that dark corner and just get on with it.

  “All right, boob-rat,” she says, cracking her knuckles. “Let’s do this.”

  She draws a deep breath. Closes her eyes.

  She hears the bird’s whistle.

  Its little claw-scrape on the sawn wood end of the stump.

  She reaches out— with her mind, not her hands. There. A little something in the dark behind her eye. Something in the three-dimensional nothing beyond her. A tiny light, a life pulsing there like an M&M-sized heart—

  And then it’s gone.

  She opens her eyes. The bird isn’t there.

  What the—  Well, fuck.

  But then: she hears it. The whistle. Not far. Just over there—on a rock covered over in creeping five-leaf ivy. Hopping about. Like it just doesn’t have a care in the world. Pecking at something. A seed, a black seed. Peck peck peck. Break. Flip seed into beak. Chomp chomp.

  Miriam can feel the cuteness seeping into her. Like a disease.

  Again she shuts her eyes. Too hard, at first— like she’s wincing, like she’s trying to block out all the light. Relax. Just lie back and think of England. Her walnut-cracker of a tight jaw loosens. Her breathing mitigates. In. Out. Ah.

  There it is again. That tiny heart.

  She reaches out for it. Feels along its margins. Pries at it like a toddler trying to peel an orange— clumsy, ineffective, impossible. An opening. Small. But she reaches in, pushes her mental thumbs downward and—

  A shrill, sharp trill.

  Miriam’s eyes jolt open. The bird is on the rock. Flopping about. She hurries over to it— the wings flap, the claws are balled up and clutched close to the bird’s white, downy breast. It’s crying out— an alarmed chirp, panicked. Something’s wrong with it. The thing’s middle is— it’s almost like the bird has a new joint. Oh, god. I broke its back.

  She did this to the bird.

  “I did this,” she says. Voice just a breath. Before she even realizes what she’s doing, she reaches out, grabs the titmouse’s head, and twists. The bones pop like bubble wrap. So easy to snuff out its life.

  Miriam leans her back against the rock. Slides down to the grass. Tearing ivy off the rock, ivy that drapes across her brow like a garland. She thinks back to a time when Uncle Jack took her out and she used his BB gun and shot a robin. Killed it. Nicely done, killer. That was an ace shot, little girl.

  She cries like she’s dying. Stupid, stupid bird.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE DEAD BIRD BONEYARD

  The wizard van sits parked between the rusted, gutted husks of two old airliners— wingless, dented tubes with broken windows, the rust on them like a disease: metal eczema, steel scabbing. The moon sits at the peak of the sky, bright and full and staring down. Hopefully, Miriam thinks, it is the only thing that sees them here tonight.

  When they pulled out of the compound— Jonestown? Keystown? Whatever— her foot was mashed hard against the accelerator, and the whole time, she knew she was going to hit a hole too hard, bust the tire, dent the rim. But the motel clerk’s mighty wizard van had real magic pumping in its pistons, because somehow, it managed.

  She expected the gate to be closed. Every part of her anticipated some kind of shootout with someone manning the exit—blond-bearded Bill or whoever— but to her surprise, nobody was there and the gate was wide open. She didn’t think much about it: a way out is a way out. You don’t stop at the doorway of a burning building to think about what it means. You jump out with flames licking at your heels.

  They drove for almost an hour— first back out of the raw and dusty road that took them to the compound in the first place. Then north, then east. Sometimes she’d see headlights ahead of them or behind and every cell inside her body would tense up— a string tied into too tight a knot— and she’d think, Here they come; they found us. But the truck would pass on the other side or the car behind them would turn off and it’d just be her and Gabby again. Alone on the dark desert road.

  Finally, they saw something. A series of shadows and shapes like dinosaurs walking, like buildings that fell. Miriam thought: This is it; we can hide here, and she pulled off the road. They found themselves in a junkyard for old planes: big ones, little ones, Cessnas and jets and whole airliners from decades past. A few helicopters, too, sitting at the edges, rotors wilting like the wings of dead dragonflies. Nothing military— all domestic, commercial aircraft.

  Now she paces. Outside the van. Gun back in her hand.

  The back doors of the van hang open. Gabby sits at the edge. The rifle is flat across her lap. She stares down at it like it’s a scrying pool.

  Miriam talks. The adrenaline is still there, chewing through her like a hive of wasps hungry to make their nests from her— and right now, she burns it off by walking and by talking.

  “They let us go,” she says. “That’s wrong. That’s fucked. Why? Why let us go? Maybe they . . . maybe they put a tracker on us. I didn’t find one but it’s night. And what would I be looking for, anyway? Jesus. Shit! Shit. Maybe they let us go because he realized we were too much trouble. The fire got too hot to hold, so he let it burn somewhere else. That could be it. We did kill his man.”

  Gabby says, “You killed him. I didn’t . . . I didn’t kill anyone.”

  An uncomfortable red flare of anger fires up inside Miriam’s gut. She wants to say: I would not have shot him if you had stayed frosty, sweetheart. But she tamps it back down.

  “Maybe I should’ve shot them all. Left a pile of corpses. Set ’em ablaze like a bonfire. Everyone would’ve thought it was the cartels.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes,” Miriam says, coldly. She stops walking. “It is.” Deep breath, refocus. Back to
pacing. Desert stone and scrub crunching under her boots. Somewhere, a coyote howls. “You know what, they’re gonna try to find us. Shit, they found Gracie out there, had a sniper lined up and everything. They got the curse like I do. They’ll find us. Somehow. Shit!”

  She roars and kicks the side of an old Boeing. The thing gongs like a metal drum. Rust flakes rain down on her and she shakes them out of her hair.

  “What is it?” Gabby asks.

  Miriam wheels. Feeling manic. She realizes now it’s another nic-fit, this one strong enough that it feels like she’s going to vibrate apart— fingers falling off her hands, arms out of their sockets, uterus plopping out like a muffler knocked off the bottom of a truck. She’ll crash and burn like one of these old planes. Wingless. Ruined. A rattletrap husk. I need a cigarette I need a cigarette I need a goddamn cocksucking motherfucking hell-shit of a cigarette.

  “I need a cigarette. It’d help me . . . see everything. It’d help me focus. I can’t— nnngh, okay. Okay. I don’t want to be drawn into this, okay? I don’t care what Ethan does, I don’t want to march in his little parade, I don’t care. This isn’t my job. It’s not my life! He wants to try to take on the US government, he wants to try to blow up the courthouse, more power to him—”

  “Wait, what? Blow up the courthouse?”

  Right. Right. Gabby doesn’t know.

  She catches Gabby up. Mary’s file— of which she only saw a birthdate, 11/7/63. The bombs at the courthouse. The gunmen with the same tattoos seen on the flags at the Coming Storm compound. And, puzzlingly, the presence of Mary “Scissors” Stitch at the scene— apologizing for what? The bombs? Maybe. Or something else? Could she have been talking right to Miriam? Through the vision? It wouldn’t be the first time. Ashley did the same thing.

  There— the look on Gabby’s face. Shell-shocked. Electrocuted by all of this cuckoo cracker factory narrative. Christ, she’s locked up like a fritzing computer.

  She’s been through so much.

  Ashley Gaynes cutting her up.

  Miriam showing her face again.

  Road trips and drug dealers and the emotional hurricane that comprises Miriam’s many ugly feelings. And now: kidnapped, dragged out to the desert, forced to hold a gun, made to watch a man’s brains evacuate his head.

  And now all this crazy talk.

  Miriam thinks, This is it. This is when Gabby breaks down. She can’t hack this. How could she? Who could abide these things and keep it all together? Miriam can barely manage— and, frankly, the fact of her togetherness is debatable.

  But Gabby says, “You’re wrong.”

  “What?”

  “This is your job. This is your life.”

  “Bullshit. I didn’t ask for it.”

  “And yet you have it. This . . . curse, this gift, it’s real. You can help people. So, you need to help them. The . . . the people at the courthouse? The little kid, Isaiah? You have a responsibility.”

  “Oh, fuck you. What do you know about responsibility?”

  Gabby looks stung. Then pissed. She shoves Miriam backward. “Don’t you dare. I’ve been keeping your shit together this whole trip. I’m responsible for you. Guess what? You’re a mess. You’re like a forest fire and I’m out here with a hose keeping you from burning down the rest of the world and everyone in it.”

  “No. I can handle my life on my own. You need to go. I’ll go find Mary. I’ll go get rid of my curse all on my own. You just . . . just go home, Gabs.”

  Gabby throws up her hands and barks a hollow laugh. “Oh, hell no. You don’t just get to discard me, Miriam, because I’m saying things you don’t like to hear. You condescending little cunt. You can’t just push me away. I know you. I get you—”

  “Please. Nobody gets me.”

  “Oh, right. Because nobody can understand you, can they? Poor Miriam. The cryptic cipher— a mystery wrapped in an enigma. If nobody ever understands you, then anything you do is fine, everything is permissible because they just don’t get it. How convenient for you. Well, I get it. I get you. I fucking understand you whether you like it or not. And what I understand is that you have a gift and you need to use it to do the right thing. To be the person I know you are.”

  Miriam jabs her in the chest with a finger. “Fine. You want to know the kind of person I am? Here it is. I know how you die.”

  “Wh . . . what?”

  She hears herself saying the most horrible thing, the thing she never wanted to say, but the reverse peristalsis cannot be stopped, the words refusing to be bitten back and choked down—

  “You kill yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t . . . I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Except: You do. Only a couple years away now. You go into your bathroom. You grab pills. And you eat a lot of them. An epic amount. And then you go and you die. You do it to yourself.” Her voice shakes as she tells it.

  Gabby is staggered. Left standing there, blinking. Her hands flexing into fists and then going slack again. All these little micro-movements— little flinches and tics— pass across her face as she struggles to contain what are probably tears.

  Then she marches up to Miriam, stares her down like a gunslinger.

  “That’s a problem for another day,” Gabby says. “Today, we have other problems. Problems you can help fix. You’re responsible for them, and I’m responsible for you, so that’s that. We need to figure out our next move. We. Not you and me separate. You and me together.”

  Miriam swallows hard.

  It strikes her like a slap:

  I thought Gabby needed me.

  But maybe I’m the one who needs Gabby.

  “Our next move should be to run. Drive far away from all this.”

  “No. We’re in this.”

  A sound by Miriam’s ear. A squeak, a stutter— like a thumb rubbing across the surface of a latex balloon. A red balloon, she imagines. Gabby doesn’t see it. It means it’s not real. She knows it’s not real.

  But just because the balloon’s not real doesn’t mean there’s not a very real message it’s carrying. Damnit.

  “The boy,” Miriam says. “You’re right. He’s in danger. I can’t—”

  “We can’t.”

  “We can’t let him go. We have to help him be safe first.”

  “And there it is.”

  Miriam sighs. “There it is, yeah.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  GAS, SNACKS, ABANDONMENT

  The wizard van idles in the parking spot. The passenger door pops open, and Gabby starts to climb in, her arms loaded for bear with snacks in bags and a dangling four-pack of Monster Energy drinks in her left hand.

  Miriam is conspicuously silent.

  Gabby must notice that, because as she’s about to drag her seatbelt across her chest, she pauses, her eyes collapsing to suspicious squints.

  “You were going to drive away, weren’t you?” Gabby asks.

  Miriam clears her throat. “I already did. I got about a mile out and felt super shitty about it. So, I drove back.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “I’m very possible.” Miriam starts the van, then says, “By the way, Monster Energy tastes like tweaker piss. But it’ll do.”

  She whips the van out of the parking lot, tires squealing.

  THIRTY-SIX

  SNIPE HUNT

  Noon. Hard and bright: the sun like napalm sprayed on and left to burn. Four crumpled cans of Monster Energy form a small sacred cairn in the center of the wizard van: a sacrifice to modern gods of get-up-and-go. The drink makes her sick and buzzy. As Miriam drives, her skin buzzes like she’s touching a live wire. Gabby slumps in the passenger side. Blearily staring out.

  “I told you, go in the back and lie down,” Miriam says.

  “No. Nope. I’m in it. I’m not going soft. You roll hard, I roll hard.”

  “What’s the next place?” Miriam asks.

  “Uhh. Ahhh.” Gabby leans forward, grabs a piece of paper with a bunch of writing hasti
ly scrawled across it. “Westgate Heights. No! No. We just did that. Trumbull Village. Which means— ooh, oh, turn here.”

  “Right or left?”

  “Right. No! No— left.”

  Miriam cuts the van hard. Tires squeal. The whole thing feels like it’s gonna roll over like a kicked log. Gabby grabs the oh-shit handle above her head and cringes.

  And suddenly, Trumbull Village. They pass a set of storage units: orange like a hunter’s vest, the fences around them bent and warped and falling down. Ahead: a few condos and townhomes. Bars on the windows. Everything blasted and bleached and sucked dry by the vampire sun. Beyond them: a series of little houses. Square and utilitarian. Shoeboxes behind chain-link. The lawns are either dead or just gravel and dust. Some have pools that even from here look toxic: bright green, like the whole thing is a giant science experiment.

  People mill about. Old folks stare through slatted blinds. Gangbangers sit on lawn chairs— little brown paper baggies underneath those chairs. Shirts just barely covering the pistols that hang tucked in their shorts and jeans.

  Eyes stare as they pass.

  Probably at the cool wizard on the side.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Gabby says.

  Miriam shrugs. “Looks like most of America to me.”

  Gabby just makes a sound: hunh. “So,” she says, and Miriam can detect the subject change the way a sea captain can predict the shifting wind. “I’m surprised you wanted to go after the kid.”

  “I don’t want to go after the kid. But you convinced me.”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  Miriam sighs. “Jesus, I know. Okay? I get it. He’s a kid. Nobody’s looking out for him. Children are routinely fucked over. Ignored or abused or otherwise ruined by their terrible parents. Parents who are terrible because, ta-da, they were once the children to terrible parents. An endlessly spinning carousel of awful people.”

  “Do you want kids someday?”