Thunderbird

by Chuck Wendig

  “You’ll come out okay. We both will.” Gabby leans forward, gives her a small and tender kiss. “We’ll see each other again.”

  Miriam keeps forcing that smile and nods. “I know we will.”

  One last lie. Because she’s not sure she believes it.

  FORTY-TWO

  MOVING THE NEEDLE

  Nighttime.

  Miriam drives the no-longer-a-wizard van.

  She crosses the border back into Arizona. The road ahead is blacker than night. The devil’s tongue, tarred and slick. Painted with a forked yellow line.

  Not long after, she pulls over and cries. First it’s a sad cry. Then an angry one. She punches the steering wheel. Kicks the dash hard enough, she dents and cracks it. Slams her elbow back into the seat again and again.

  She misses Louis. She misses Gabby. She misses the wizard.

  Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  A bird passes in front of the moon. A vulture, probably.

  Thunder follows it. Distant.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Miriam gasps. There sits Gabby in the passenger seat. Smiling. She turns slowly, and blood glistens in the moonlight. Blood seeping from cracks in her face, cracks like those in a shattered porcelain vase. Bits of her skin and skull slide together and then apart like floating puzzle pieces.

  “Fuck you,” Miriam tells the Trespasser.

  “No, fuck you for wanting to be rid of me.” Not-Gabby pouts. Black fluid bubbles up between a split in her lips and oozes down her chin.

  “I don’t want this anymore. I don’t want you.”

  “Rejection really does sting, doesn’t it?”

  “Go away. I don’t need you anymore.”

  “We’ll see. You might need me yet.”

  Those last words, spoken by nothing but a red mist— a crimson vapor that seems to dissipate in front of Miriam’s eyes.

  Somewhere, out over the desert, a coyote howls.

  Miriam sits for a while. Her fingers wrap around the wheel of the van until they’ve been squeezed bloodless. Get it together, she thinks. You’re about to go find the person you’ve been seeking for a year. You may finally have an answer. You may finally have a way out. Get pumped, bitch. It’s time to finish this.

  She lets out a war whoop.

  It feels insincere. And so, like she is both the woman onstage and the audience listening, she thinks: I can’t hear you.

  War whoop number two. Better. Louder. Giddier. Good.

  She pulls off the highway shoulder and guns it.

  Miriam watches the needle on the gas tank dropping. Will she make it? As she drives, she reaches down in the seats— finds some change. A rolled-up dollar bill. A rough count after five minutes of searching is she has about two dollars and fifty cents. Thankfully, she spies a gas station ahead and pays two bucks for gas, then buys a single Slim Jim. Then it’s back on the road, spicy meat tube between her teeth, foot back on the pedal.

  Radio on. Only station it’ll get is a Spanish-language talk show. Miriam doesn’t understand it. White girl from Pennsylvania. In school, they had to learn a language and she was going to take Spanish because it seemed practical, but her mother said, What, do you want to be a dishwasher someday? And the next choice was French but that earned her a pissy, puckered look too. So: German it was, and now the only part of that she remembers is a single line from her beat-ass ’70s-era textbook: Hallo, ich möchte Ihre Wurst essen!

  Hello, I would like to eat your sausage.

  Good times.

  She laughs at that, a mad cackle.

  Then she cranks the Mexican talk show and floors it.

  Turns the journey south. Road starts to break up here. The patched cracks in the road like a junkie’s veins— black, obvious, like hungry worms just beneath the skin. The ground grows craggier too. Like broken teeth, red from meat.

  The moon crests high. Fat and round, a spider’s egg straining to hatch.

  Now she’s really feeling electric. Like she’s close. So close. A year, a whole year, looking for this one woman. A woman who helped Sugar’s mother many years before— told her the way out of her curse. Drew her a path to escape the maze. But Mary Stitch has been bouncing around like one of those superballs from a department store vending machine— whipped against the wall, bouncing here, there, knocking over a lamp, clipping a painting, sending a candy dish scattering M&M’s. Miriam’s tracked her from Colorado to Nevada, New Mexico, and now to Arizona. A psycho psychic in Collbran. A gambler in Reno. A whole crew of bikers in New Mexico. And now: here. With all this shit. With the dust and the dry air and the static-snap feeling of finality in the air . . .

  (Here her mind flashes to the courthouse again— walls coming down, screams, death and destruction compacting those people to jelly. She shudders. Gabby’s voice again: You have to do something.)

  It can all be over soon.

  An end to what has made Miriam for the last ten years. The dead bird around her neck. The thing that broke her.

  She wants to be whole again. And her mind plays out all the possibilities: What happens when it’s all different? What’s the way forward? She thought it would be Louis. That’s not happening now, is it? Gabby will be there, though— a part of her life, somehow. (And here, a grim voice reminds: If you can stop her from downing the contents of her medicine cabinet. If you lose your curse, do you also lose your ability to change the fate you’ve seen? In this, did you ever really have the power? To stop Gabby from killing herself— who would you kill? What eye will match that eye, what tooth will repay that tooth? She curses her own brain to shut up, shut up, shut up.)

  Miriam kicks the mirror inside her own head. When she stares at herself through the broken glass, what reflects back? What does she see? Who will she become after all this is done? Waitress? One of those women who run the roulette table, spinning a different kind of fate? Maybe she’ll own a restaurant. Ooh, a breakfast joint. Yeah. Fuck yeah, breakfast.

  Maybe she’ll be a mailman. Instead of delivering people visions of their end, she’ll deliver them grocery circulars, tax bills, Christmas cards.

  Her fingers wrap around the wheel. Her foot presses on the pedal harder. The speedometer ticks up, up, up.

  She’ll run a breakfast joint in the morning. Then be a mailman in the afternoon. At night she’ll watch bad TV. At home. Hell, not just a home— a house, a proper house with a stove and a couch and a fridge full of food.

  It doesn’t have to be a fantasy, does it? And here she reminds herself: You tried this before, dum-dum. Remember Louis? Him setting you up at the Shore? You had a little house. A job. A normal life. How’d that go for you?

  This time, she thinks, it’ll be different. It has to be.

  Doesn’t it?

  FORTY-THREE

  THE HOUSE OF GODLESSNESS

  A cat sits in a birdbath, green eyes glittering as the headlights pass over it. It doesn’t budge. Just sits and stares. The house beyond is not a house at all but an old church: a small white chapel, the cross long gone from the tip of the steeple, the bell gone from within it. A mailbox sits out front.

  This, on the outskirts of Tucson. North. Nowhere.

  Little lights in the distance. Other houses. But no neighbors here.

  Miriam thinks to pull away, go somewhere else until sunup—what’s she going to do? Go kick the door down at close to midnight? Demand salvation? A cure for her curse? A Hot Pocket and a shot of tequila and call me in the morning?

  But then a light comes on inside the house-chapel.

  Then a light outside the front door.

  The cat finally scatters— hair stiffening, tail straight. Zoom. Gone.

  The no-longer-a-wizard van idles. The front door of the house— a door painted red long ago, the paint peeling like sunburned skin—opens up.

  And a woman stands there. Long, stringy gray hair. In her fifties. The woman from the vision at the courthouse. The woman in the photos Miriam saw when she was casing Weldon Stitch�
��s place. There stands Mary Stitch. Mary Scissors. Mary Ciseaux.

  The woman yells, “You coming in or what?”

  Deep breath. Maybe this won’t fix you. Maybe she doesn’t know anything. Don’t get your hopes up. But her hopes are up. Way the fuck up, so up they’re puncturing the atmosphere, moon up, stars up, another galaxy up, flying so far that “up” doesn’t even mean anything anymore.

  She cuts the engine. She heads inside.

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE HEART OF LIGHTNING

  Mary’s already gone from the front door when Miriam enters. The house really is an old chapel— the room of worship still with half its pews intact, most of them crooked and half-collapsed. Where the pulpit once sat is now a makeshift kitchen: Miriam spies a hotplate, a toaster oven, an electric kettle sitting on a small table. A little college dorm–size fridge underneath. Two doors lead out of this room and deeper into the old chapel.

  Mary appears again. She’s got a bottle of something and two glasses. Way she walks, she has a hippie’s rangy, roaming pace. Once-black hair gone mostly gray. She looks old— older than her years. Like something’s been robbed from her. Or dried up and died out.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she says, waving Miriam deeper in. The woman winds her way through the jagged pews, to a small card table set off to the side. She knees a stool closer to the table, then pulls up a small chair like you’d find in an elementary school. She squats on the chair, nods to the stool. “Sit.”

  Two glasses down. Thunk, thunk. Bottle without a label uncorked— ploomp. She pours a clear liquid. Knuckles it closer to Miriam. “Drink.”

  Miriam takes it. Slugs it back. It tastes like barbequed tequila. Smoky. But smooth, too. “Mescal?” she asks.

  “Hunh,” Mary says by way of grunted confirmation. “Friend south of the border makes it. Some call it the elixir of the gods. There’s a myth behind it because there’s a myth behind all things, and the myth says that lightning came from the sky during a storm and struck a plant, an agave plant. Boom. Tore it open and cooked the heart of the thing— the pina. And the juices that ran fresh from it was the first mescal. A gift from the gods above to man below.”

  “It’s a helluva thing.”

  “Mm. Mm-hmm.” Mary drinks hers in one gulp. “You’re usually more careful than this, Miriam.”

  “What? How do you know my name?”

  Mary leans in, gives her a look. A look that says, C’mon, honey. “This ain’t my first bullfight. You’re young yet. Old in the eyes, maybe, but young. I’ve been out here doing my thing for a long, long time. And I know you’ve been looking for me. I wondered if you’d make it. If you had the salt. You did, and you do, and now here you are, sharing a little god-juice with me. But you didn’t flinch. You took the glass and drank it. I could’ve drugged you. Or could’ve been serving you a cold glass of coyote piss. You strike me as the type who would’ve been suspicious, and yet— you didn’t even stop a second to think that I’d do you like that. Which tells me you want something from me. And you want it very badly.”

  You have no idea.

  “I have a . . . curse,” Miriam says.

  “So do we all. What is it?”

  “I can see how people are going to die.”

  “Morbid.”

  “I guess.”

  Mary pours another glass of mescal for herself— and tops off Miriam’s glass, too. “So, you think I can— what? Help you undo it?”

  “That’s what I’m hoping.”

  “Hoping hard. So. What do I get out of it?”

  “I . . .”

  “You didn’t think about that, did you? Just me, me, me. Gimme, gimme, gimme. That’s no way to be, Miriam.”

  No, don’t lose her: don’t fuck this up. Miriam does what she despises doing: she apologizes. And doubly strange: she means it. “I’m sorry. I didn’t— you’re right. I do think about me a lot. I want to change. I want to do differently. That’s what this is all about. So. Just name it. Name your price.”

  Mary sniffs. Leans back. Glass in hand, swirling the mescal.

  “I want you to drive me somewhere.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it. I have business to take care of— and as you’ll note, I don’t have a car. I worked with some chemists recently. Part of a small Arizona group. Trying to make inroads against the cartels— doing their own meth, synthetic heroin, hydroponic weed.”

  Miriam nods. “I talked to one of those dealers. Helped me find you.”

  “Huh. Well. They owe me money. You drive me there, I get paid. Then we’re square, and I’ll tell you just what you need to know.”

  Miriam watches her. Every time she blinks— every time her eyes go dark behind falling lids— she sees Mary Stitch there at the courthouse. Whispering an apology before death. And it’s like the woman can tell. She narrows her eyes.

  “What are you looking at?” Mary asks. “What do you see?”

  “Just trying to figure you out, is all.”

  “I’m no puzzle, honey. Nobody is. We all just want what we want.”

  “But why we want things,” Miriam says, “there’s the rub.”

  Mary chuckles. “Guess so. I know what you want, anyway, and like I said, the way you get it is by us taking a drive. So, let’s take a drive.”

  “Now?”

  “You got something better to do?”

  Miriam shakes her head.

  Then Mary shrugs. “No time like the right now.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

  They’re headed to the van, and Mary says, “Ah, shit.”

  Miriam turns. “What?”

  “I wanted to bring that bottle with us. Gimme a second.”

  The old hippie takes her time wandering back to the chapel, pulling her hair back in a ponytail as she walks.

  Miriam stands near the hood of the van. Staring out at the lights over the desert. Windows of houses. Headlights. All far enough away that they might as well be a world apart. Above them, the nighttime sky is a wide mouth, deep and dark and eternally hungry.

  She hears the door lock up and the sound of feet crunching on loose stone and scree. Miriam says, “It’s pretty out here. Maybe I’ll live like this someday.”

  “Maybe,” Mary says.

  Miriam turns and it takes her a moment to parse what she’s seeing. The other woman, chin up, her mouth a scowl like a twist of bitter lemon.

  A gun in her hand. A little automatic.

  “This is going to hurt,” Mary says plainly.

  Then she pulls the trigger.

  Miriam twitches. A feeling hits her— like being punched in the chest.

  Everything sinks. Like an anchor crashing through ice. She turns— I need to run, need to get out of here, but she takes one step and it’s like her whole middle is a black hole drawing everything in. Light. Sound. All her energy. Her knee jukes left and she drops. Wheezing. Can’t catch a breath. Her fingers claw at the ground.

  Mary stands above her. Stoops, then rolls Miriam over.

  Air comes in a screaming wheeze. In. Out. A high-pitched whine. Darkness creeps in at the edges of Miriam’s vision.

  “Stay with me,” Mary says. She holds up the gun. Gives it a little shake. “This is a .22 caliber pistol. Okay? Listen to me, now. Focus. It’s a small bullet, tinier than my pinky finger’s tip.” She wriggles that finger like an inchworm. “That bullet just went through your right lung. Like a cannon through a pirate ship’s sail. Now you got wind whistling through the gap. Feels like there’s a hard pressure at your chest, huh?”

  Miriam blinks through the haze. She feels it. Like . . . all of her is leaving, being sucked out of her, up into the starving sky.

  Mary sniffs, nods. “That’s what they call a sucking chest wound. Like popping the door on an airplane as it flies. Creates an effect called a pneumothorax. Won’t be long now before your chest will fill up with all this bad air, start putting pressure on your heart and o
ther lung. You’ll undergo cardiopulmonary arrest. You’ll be dead in about five minutes.”

  Miriam reaches for the air. Claws at nothing. Imagines her hands around this woman’s throat. Closing. A dream. An illusion. No.

  Tries to scream. Weep. Yell. Anything. Nothing.

  Just hissing, keening air from the bubbling blood hole in her chest.

  “You never asked me what my gift was. Did you?” Mary hmmphs. “And it is a gift. I have used it to great favor throughout my life. I can see weakness. In people. In things. In structures, systems, even ideas. I can see how you break something down. Cut it apart. A snip-snip of the scissors. I knew where to shoot you. But I know so much more. All these threads tied to you. Chains, really.” She draws a deep breath, like she’s centering herself, finding focus. “We need you alive for what’s to come, Miriam. My new friends have made that a requirement.”

  A vibration in the ground. Faint. Stronger. Headlights cutting through the night as Mary straightens up, reaches in her pocket, pulls out a small, thin something. A card.

  “A playing card,” Mary says. “Queen of hearts.”

  “Fuhhh.” Miriam gulps, trying to catch air the way a child catches fireflies in a jar. “Youuu.”

  “Such anger. That’s one of your chains.” Mary stoops. Flips the playing card around and around. Then reaches under Miriam’s shirt— hands, ice cold and burning hot at the same time— and pops the card against the bullet hole.

  Miriam’s body rocks like it’s hit by a wave.

  Suddenly, she can breathe.

  Still a keening wheeze, but— in, out, in, out.

  “Just gotta stop the chest wound from sucking so hard,” Mary says with a wink. “That’ll give you about five, maybe six hours more of life. Here’s my new friends. You know them, I think.” Mary stands, her knees cracking and popping like bubble wrap. “Ethan. Ofelia.”

  Miriam hears Ethan Key’s voice. “Hello, Mary. Thanks for this.”

  “Motherfucker.” Miriam seethes.

  “She’s feisty,” Mary says. “Dumb, too. Stepped right in it.”