Blackbirds

THIRTY-EIGHT

The Third and Final Hour

 

No movement.

 

Shitty, dead-fish-floating-in-the-water lack of movement.

 

Miriam was cooking with gas. Then she reached the causeway crossing the Barnegat Bay and traffic locked up tighter than a handful of tampons crammed up a nun's asshole.

 

Now it's car after car. Kayaks and boat trailers and pale yuppies and kids watching Spongebob Squarepants on DVD screens in the backs of the front seats. Even this late in the day, people are desperate for a taste of the beach, a whiff of sand and surf (the surf smelling like rotting mollusks and the sand home to old hypodermic needles and clumpy, filth-caked condoms). The sun has long faded, just a bleary smear against the dark clouds hovering above the island. It's like a line of tourists driving toward the Rapture.

 

Miriam lays on the horn.

 

The last cigarette from the pack is down to its nub. She grits her teeth and flicks it out the window, and it bounces off the hood of a silver mini-van next to her.

 

The mother in the passenger seat – a blimpy hippo already sunburned so badly it looks like she's been wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights – shoots her a sour stare.

 

Miriam thinks of shooting the woman back, with bullets.

 

Miriam elbows the horn again. She's feeling claustrophobic. This is coming down to the wire. She's been sitting in traffic for far too long now.

 

She needs a sign.

 

"I need a sign," she says, panicked.

 

"Here comes one," Louis says in the back seat. He peels up his electrical tape and reveals not a gaping socket as usual, but a ruined eye that looks more like a thumb-squished grape than anything else. For added effect, he winks.

 

Then he's gone.

 

Miriam desperately looks around to see what he's talking about.

 

Sour, sunburned lady? No.

 

Carload of dogs and screaming children in front of her? Probably not.

 

A small plane flies overhead. But since she doesn't have any kind of Batman grappling hook on her belt, she thinks that plan is pretty much fucked from the get-go.

 

Then she sees it.

 

A biker – no, a cyclist.

 

He's lean and ropy, dressed to the nines in red-and-blue spandex like he's the Superman of the bicycle crowd.

 

As he whizzes past on the side of the causeway, Miriam throws open the passenger side door.

 

His front tire meets unyielding resistance.

 

The cyclist flies over the open door. She hears, but does not see, his head hit the pavement. At least he's wearing a helmet.

 

Miriam's up and out of the car and on the bike before she even thinks about it. The front tire's bent a little from where it smacked into the Subaru's door, but even wobbly, it's locomotion.

 

She checks the cell phone.

 

She has less than an hour now.

 

"My bike!" the cyclist cries.

 

Miriam steers unsteadily past.

 

THIRTY-NINE

Frankie

 

The Barnegat Lighthouse – Old Barney – stands ahead.

 

The winding sandy path is hemmed in by a rickety post-andrail fence, which is itself hemmed in by black shrubs with yellow flowers.

 

Gulls cackle and complain overhead, where black garlands of clouds look like distant bands of blackbirds.

 

The tides rush in, rush out, an outlying murmur.

 

Miriam steps over the yellow police tape that's meant to block people from going in, and she steps past the sign announcing "Under Construction" and another sign explaining that soon the lighthouse will be home to a new lantern and state-of-the-art polycarbonate windows.

 

It feels like she's on a rollercoaster ride – cresting the hill, though no hill awaits. Her stomach is home to squirming eels. It expands and contracts. Sinks and swims.

 

Her feet fall on sand that shifts beneath them. She sucks in a breath and kicks off her shoes. A sense of the inevitable precedes her, running ahead like an eager dog. She feels like she's a little girl forced to approach a mother who waits with a leather belt in hand.

 

She walks.

 

It feels like she's not approaching the lighthouse, but that it's approaching her.

 

You can't change anything. Her own voice, not Louis's, chiding her in her head. Just remember that. You're not here to change anything. You're just here to bear witness. It's what you do. It's what you are. You're the war crow on the battlefield. The chooser of the slain.

 

She reaches the end of the hedges. The sand path continues toward the lighthouse. The lighthouse has a white base, a brick red top.

 

Frankie mills about outside. He's a tall drink of motor oil on the bright beach, a dark shape on an illuminated X-Ray, a long dark shadow in sympathy with the sky above. He paces. Rubs his nose. Itches his ear.

 

Hairless, the man Harriet called Ingersoll, is nowhere to be seen.

 

It's almost time. Miriam doesn't have to look at the cell phone to know it.

 

But she pulls out the phone anyway. Gun in one hand, phone in the other, and diary tucked in her pants, she thumbs the redial button on the phone.

 

Then she starts walking.

 

Frankie's phone rings. It should. She's calling it.

 

He answers, and she hears him in stereo – his voice on the phone and his voice ahead: "Harriet?"

 

Miriam wings the phone at his head like a fucking boomerang. It whips hard across the bridge of his not-insignificant nose, and he staggers, blinking back tears.

 

She thinks to shoot him, but – No. Ingersoll will hear the shot. Don't do it.

 

Instead, she hurries up and drives the barrel of the gun deep into Frankie's solar plexus.

 

"The solar plexus is a massive bundle of nerves," Miriam hisses.

 

Frankie fumbles for his gun, but Miriam's knee to his wrist knocks it from his hand.

 

As he wheezes, his face turning red, she chops him in the neck with the butt of the pistol.

 

"Mastoid process triggers your gag reflex."

 

True to her information, he doubles over, gagging. He doesn't dry heave; he vomits what looks like a half-digested hoagie.

 

She wonders how she's going to kill him. Hunched over in a Sumo position, puking on himself, he's trying to crabwalk backward.

 

Fuck it, she thinks. Strangle him to death.

 

Miriam gets behind him and takes her gun arm and brings the crook of the elbow up under his throat. She pulls back hard enough to choke a pony –

 

Frankie's an old man forty-two years from now, and he's sitting in a darkened theater with his grandson, and the boy is held rapt as his face is lit by whatever it is that's on the screen. The boy is beaming, and Frankie sees it, and then he lays his head back and rests his eyes and lets the heart attack that's been attacking him for the last six hours, working him over with dull pipe and crushing grip, finally take him. His mouth opens, gasping one last breath, and the boy doesn't notice; he just keeps watching.

 

– and she lets go. Frankie, gasping, stumbles forward into his own hoagie bile.

 

He tries to stand, but Miriam presses the gun to the back of his head.

 

"You're going to be a grandfather someday," she says.

 

"OK," he croaks, blinking back tears.

 

"You don't really like this life, do you?"

 

"No. Christ, no. I hate it."

 

"You have the keys to the Escalade?"

 

He nods.

 

"Take them. Go to it. Get away. You don't want to be here."

 

Another nod.

 

"I see you again," she says, "I'll make sure you never get to be a grandfather."

 

She moves past him and heads into the lighthouse as thunder tumbles over thunder, not far away now, but very close.

 

Chuck Wendig's books