Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  Miriam gives her the side-eye. “What, with you?”

  Gabby flinches. She tries not to show it, but that question— or worse, the way Miriam asked it— must’ve hurt.

  “Someday,” Gabby says, defensive. “I mean . . . eventually. With someone.”

  “I . . .” Miriam really, really doesn’t want to get to the next part, but oh, hell, here it comes: “I was pregnant once.”

  “What? Oh.”

  “Uh-huh. High school. I was Little Miss Repressed and I found this boy I liked, Ben, and we got smashed on my mother’s liquor and banged like awkward squirrels in the woods. Just once. Ah. Young love. Turns out that can make a baby, who knew? Obviously, my school didn’t, nor did my mother, since the only thing they preached was don’t fuck anybody— and since fucking somebody is the first and last thing a teenager thinks about every day, not a real valuable approach in terms of sexual education. It’s like telling people to not go outside instead of preparing them for what they find when they’re out there.”

  “Turn here,” Gabby says. Miriam eases the van down into a little subdivision. More shoeboxes, fences, nuclear pools, dead lawns. “So. What happened?”

  “My mother wanted me to carry to term. I did, too, if only because I wasn’t really aware that abortion was an option and because I grew up kinda cuckoo religious and I guess even though I didn’t believe it all, I didn’t want there to be a chance that my tiny little non-baby would go to Hell— because there’s a God I want to believe in, the kind who sends aborted babies to dwell in eternal misery.”

  “You had the baby?”

  “I . . . did not. It’s, ahh. Complicated?” What’s complicated about it? Ben shot himself. His mother lost her mind. She found you in the bathroom at school and beat you half to death with a red snow shovel. “I lost the baby.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I got . . . all this.” Miriam sweeps her arms out over the duct tape–wrapped steering wheel. “I almost died, and when I woke up, I had this thing. This way to see how other people were going to bite it.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I don’t think Jesus had anything to do with this one.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Miriam shrugs. This is one of those stories she wishes she was telling with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. “Don’t be. Probably a good thing. Er, in the universal sense, at least. Me, with a kid? Even back then that was a recipe for a nightmare. Even at my nicest, I would’ve made a wretched mother.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It’s good to realize that. Not everybody is meant to be a mother or a father, and the more of those assholes figure that out, the better. But for some reason, our biological urge to reproduce is given this gross social weight. Oh, are you pregnant? When are you going to have a baby? Are you? Will you? Won’t you? What’s wrong with you? It’s like if you’re not a breeder, you’re a nobody.”

  Gabby holds out her fist. “Lesbian fistbump on that one.”

  Miriam goes to bump it.

  But.

  Whoa.

  “Look,” she says, staring ahead.

  “I don’t know what I’m— oh.”

  The pickup truck.

  Her pickup truck.

  Parked dead ahead.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  GOOD NIGHT, GRACIE

  Pay dirt.

  Before coming out here, they stopped at a local library in Phoenix, just as it opened. And they— well, let’s be honest, Gabby— did some research. With the help of a reference librarian who, according to Gabby, was a wizard with far greater magic than that Nordic douche on the side of the van.

  Didn’t take long to track a trail of breadcrumbs through the newspapers: First, the boy who lived, Isaiah. Died twice, yet lived. Then the mother: Grace Baker. Arizona streetwalker. Or was. Arrested. Multiple times for prostitution, and a few for drug charges, too.

  It’s the drug charges that give them the thread to pull.

  Found across police blotters in the newspapers: Grace’s last arrest was two years ago. She was found at her boyfriend’s house in, sure enough, Albuquerque, New Mexico. The boyfriend: Hermes Vela. Probably also her pimp and/or her dealer. Trumbull Village. Utah Street.

  Which is where they find Miriam’s pickup truck.

  She lets the van drift past it.

  “Where are you going?” Gabby asks. “That’s your—”

  “Yeah, I know. I wanna park down a ways. Just . . . in case.”

  “Oh. Good thinking.”

  Miriam winks. “That’s why I’m not dead yet.”

  Though it’s been close, hasn’t it?

  She eases the van up to a decrepit playground. A sandpit, really. Most of it gone to rust, though the slide looks recently replaced— the metal shines so bright in the sun, it looks like it’s gone molten.

  Miriam kisses her hand, presses it against the dashboard.

  “What’s that for?” Gabby asks.

  “We won’t see this brave wizardly steed again.” She sees Gabby’s quizzical stare and answers it with: “I’m gonna get my fucking truck back.”

  Then she grabs the pistol out of the glove compartment. They both get out.

  The heat hits them like a slamming door.

  Global heat death is on its way, Miriam thinks— though, at least, not in her lifetime. (If it were, she’d have seen it in the death visions by now. So, the planet gets at least a century to survive before it bursts into flame.)

  Together, they head to the house. Shattered sidewalk underneath their feet. A little brown lizard hurries to and fro in front of them, fleeing them and scurrying from one dead scrubby shrub to the next. Like Godzilla in reverse.

  The house is tan. The yard matches it in color: just pebbles and dirt. A junker Toyota sits in the driveway, the back windshield blasted out. Tossed off to the side: a kid’s Big Wheel, crushed. As if by a tire.

  “Looks like a kid lives here,” Gabby says.

  “Looks like a kid could learn the alphabet by going through all the varieties of hepatitis that live here,” Miriam counters. A through Z and 1, 2, 3, she thinks. “No idea what to expect,” she adds. “You ready?”

  Gabby nods. She’s not ready. That’s as obvious as the sun in the sky. But nothing to be done now. Miriam goes to the front door.

  To knock, or not to knock. That is the question.

  Fuck it. She tries the knob.

  The door opens.

  Huh. Okay.

  Inside: a smell hits her.

  Oh, no, no, no.

  Spoiled food. But something else, too: the smell of death. And death isn’t just the stink of a body gone south. It’s all the things that come with it, too. The waste, the fluids, the life leaking out in drips or gouts.

  Gabby covers her nose. Miriam just steps in. Thinks: Please don’t let it be the boy. Please. A shadow passes in front of her. A red balloon, floating. She pauses, shuts her eyes, opens them again. The balloon is gone. Never there.

  The carpet at the fore of the apartment is ragged, torn. They turn left into a shitty living room. A flatscreen— newish— sits on a coffee table pressed against the wall. Opposite that: a couch that looks like a sagging old man. Broken down so far, it looks like any minute the whole thing could just disintegrate into dust mites and floating fibers. A little tray for kid’s food— Disney characters on it, fading— sits on the cushions. No food there. Pills. A needle. A satchel. A Ring Pop, of all things. Just sitting there. Still life in drug culture.

  Three ways out of this room. One is the way they just came. Another looks like a short hallway going to— where? Bedrooms, probably. Next to that, a small door. A door that’s open just a crack.

  Miriam holds a breath. Creeps gingerly toward it. Gives it a nudge with the flat of her boot and—

  There sits Gracie Baker.

  Her T-shirt slick with vomit. Mouth hanging open. The whites of her eyes gone liver-yellow and blood-black. Gray lips. A couple flies take fl
ight, disturbed from their prize.

  A needle hangs out of her dead arm.

  It’s like the color’s starting to go out of her skin. Ashen and fading.

  “Hey,” says a voice behind them. Gabby starts to scream but clamps it down with a cupped hand. Miriam wheels, reaches for the pistol—

  A lanky guy with broad shoulders and ribs showing underneath a too-tight white tee comes in from the hallway, picking his teeth with a chopstick. He walks right past them. Dude doesn’t sit so much as he just lets all control of his body go: his frame collapsing onto the couch like an emptied bucket of chicken bones.

  He stares at the TV— or past it, really— and reaches into the couch cushions to fish out a remote control. TV goes on. He starts talking, still looking a million miles away: “Yeah, yeah, you need, ahh, whatcha need? You here for pills, I got pills. Oxy, Perks, Vikes. Don’t, uhh, don’t got the new diesel yet, the stuff from Sinaloa, but, you know. You know. Unless you’re here to work.”

  It’s Gabby that says it: “There is a dead woman in your bathroom.”

  “Mm-hmm, mm-hm. That’s a shame, that’s a cold shame, but she couldn’t hang, and so we’ll figure that out, that’s okay.” He blinks. His pupils are big as slingshot marbles. “So, whatcha need, huh?”

  “We want the boy,” Miriam says.

  “Huh? What boy?” But he shakes his head. “Oh. You want Gracie’s boy. Izzy. Voodoo child. That one’s in the back bedroom. Second door down. You can have him. State won’t pay me for him. Paperwork, man.” The man— Hermes, Miriam is guessing— lifts his hand and, in a limp, frittering gesture, points toward the back of the house.

  Then he reaches down and pops that Ring Pop in his mouth.

  Sucking on it noisily. Eyes pointed at nothing.

  Miriam gives Gabby a look. Whispers: “Come on.” Gabby gives a short nod and the two of them duck down the hallway. Together, they creep toward the second door. Even in the dry heat, Miriam’s palms sweat. Just as she didn’t want to see the boy dead, now she’s afraid of what she’ll see.

  That one’s in the back bedroom, Hermes said.

  Children in the bedrooms of strange men is not something she wants to think about.

  But what choice is there? She opens the door.

  . . . and nobody’s here. Just a messy bed. Old snacks strewn about. A dirty cereal bowl growing a brain-shaped bloom of mold over it. Dirty clothes. A rank smell.

  Then: a sound. Movement. From inside the closet.

  She hurries in, moves the sliding door—

  Isaiah. The boy in the Superman T-shirt. Sitting there next to a half-collapsed set of drawers. “He told me if I left here, he’d shoot me,” the boy says. He smells like piss. His pants are soaked through.

  “Come on,” Miriam says, holding out her hand.

  But he doesn’t take it. “I know you. I saw you. You’re the truck lady.”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” She tries to smile. It feels forced. “I’m her.”

  “Where’s my momma?”

  “She’s dead.” Those two words come out of her mouth like a pair of hammers— clunk, clunk. She can’t take them back now.

  The boy blinks. His eyes, wet. But tears never fall.

  “Okay,” he says.

  From the front of the house, Gabby hissing from the hallway: “Miriam! Miriam!” Shit, what now? Miriam leads the boy to the door of the bedroom but tells him to stay there until she gets back.

  Gabby points toward the living room, and at first, Miriam doesn’t see it.

  “A car just pulled up outside,” Gabby says. And sure enough, past the living room to the window beyond— not a car, but an SUV. Black. Smeary with rust-red dust.

  Two men and one woman are getting out. One of the men, she’s seen before. She saw him at the Coming Storm’s compound.

  None of them have guns out, but she can see the bulges: they’re all packing.

  Did they follow the same trail Miriam and Gabby found? Or is this something else? Does Karen Key have some way into her head? God, this is making her paranoid. No time to worry about that.

  Now they’ve got to get out. With the boy.

  Think. Think.

  “Hermes?” Miriam asks, hoping that’s really his name.

  He blinks, then finally looks at her. “Whuh?”

  “You got a gun?”

  “Somewhere. Shit. Where’d I leave it?”

  She hates to do it, but she has to give it up. She turns her own pistol around and hands it to him. “There are people outside. They’re coming to take your drugs. Right fucking now.”

  His slack mouth tightens up. His shoulders surge forward.

  “Protect what’s yours,” she hisses.

  “Damn, yeah,” he says, licking his lips and standing up.

  Miriam grabs Gabby by the elbow. Drags her back into the house. She fetches Isaiah and his hand touches hers—

  The feeling of being crushed and smothered by dirt, grave dirt heaped upon her, pressed around her, soil in her mouth, packed in her ears, until all she tastes is filth and all she hears are the cooling sounds of the earth and her own galloping heartbeat and everything is noise and pressure and breathless death—

  There. Not a proper vision. He’s got powers, like Ethan said. She doesn’t know what. But whatever it is— it’s real.

  No time to think about that now.

  Together, the three of them hurry toward the last door: another bedroom, Hermes’s bedroom, a worse mess than anywhere else. Clothes strewn. Two bongs. The skunk of spilled bongwater. Condoms new and used strewn about like holiday decorations.

  A window in the back. Barred, but those bars open from the inside— they hang on a hinge. Miriam with one hand opens the window and then helps Gabby undo the locks of the bars.

  At the front of the house: a door kicked open.

  Yelling.

  Then: gunfire.

  “Go go go!” Miriam says, and Gabby clambers out. She helps Isaiah climb up and out— Gabby assists from the other side. Then Miriam goes.

  They hit the ground and bolt.

  A stray thought, absurd and disappointing, hits Miriam like a rock from a slingshot: I’m not getting my truck back, am I?

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  ANGELS AND DEMONS

  The boy sleeps on the motel bed. The motel is a rat-trap and cockroach party— one of the few that let them pay with cash.

  Miriam stands over the bed as he sleeps curled up around a pillow.

  She imagines that he thinks it’s his mother. That may not be true. He looks like a tough little peanut, this kid, and turns out that Grace Baker wasn’t much of a mother to him. Maybe she wanted to be, but life isn’t kind to people at their level. Miriam knows that because she’s seen it, been in it, lived it.

  Gabby comes up behind her. She rubs Miriam’s shoulder. Outside, the bright red-and-orange neon of the tepee-shaped motel sign blinks. Casts the room in a kind of strange, hellish hue.

  “I don’t know what to do with it,” Miriam says.

  “It? You mean Isaiah?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “First, you might want to call him ‘him’ instead of ‘it.’ ”

  “I guess.” She scrunches up her face. “He’s going to want to eat. And he’ll need clothes. Ugh. Do they take baths? They probably take baths.” She sniffs the air. “He smells like bongwater and piss, so he’s going to need a bath.” Pause. “Shit.”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  Miriam wheels. She whisper-hisses: “No, it fucking will not! I don’t— I’m not a caretaker. This is not my bag. I don’t understand children. I barely understand adults.” I barely understand myself. “He’s not my responsibility.”

  “So, whose, then?”

  “I dunno! The system’s.”

  “The system did such wonders for him already,” Gabby says, hands on her hips. “The system is how he ended up with Ethan Key and his cult in the first place. The system routinely fails people.”

  �
��So, what are you proposing?”

  “I’m not proposing anything. I’m just saying we keep him safe. For now. When dark skies clear up, we’ll figure out the best place for him.”

  Miriam chews on that but nods. And here, a voice in her ear, a voice not hers, a voice that belongs to dozens of others— Louis, Uncle Jack, Ben, Melora, even her own mother: Don’t you wonder what he can do? He has a power like you. And still you don’t know what it is. Can you trust the world to handle him? Can you trust him to handle the world?

  “I need to sleep,” Miriam says.

  “That’s a good idea. You can take the bed with Isaiah—”

  “No,” Miriam says— too abruptly, she realizes. “You take the bed. I’ll sleep on the floor. Then, in the morning, we need to figure out our next steps.”

  INTERLUDE

  THE TRICKSTER

  A coyote sits on a rock. It is plainly dead, and yet there it sits. One eye runny like an over-easy egg. Fur coming off in wet, sloughing patches. Bits of rib showing. A gray tongue panting.

  Miriam sits across from the coyote. She is also on a rock.

  Around them: the desert at night.

  A bird shrieks somewhere. Crosses the moon. A big thing: massive, blotting out the light, sweeping across the stars like a hand in front of a projector’s beam. Somewhere, thunder tumbles like falling rocks.

  “Dreaming,” she says.

  “You always do that,” the coyote says. Voice raspy. An old man’s rheumy rumble, like hard phlegm rattling around in the well of his chest. “You always like to assess whether what you’re seeing is real or a dream.”

  “Given my life, it’s a smart play.”

  On her knee sits a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. Her hand moves— almost of its own volition— to the pack. The thumb toys with the flip-top.

  “What if you’re wrong?” the animal asks.

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Oh, you follow me just fine. I mean: what if your waking life is the dream, and this dream is what’s real?”

  She holds her hand to her mouth in mock existential shock. “What if my color blue is your color red! What if this is all a computer simulation! What if we’re all just in the snow globe of a little handicapped boy!” She rolls her eyes. “Spare me the philosophical wank. You have something to say, so say it.”