Mockingbird (12 page)

  Miriam narrows her eyes, pretends to think about it. "Hmm, no, no, doesn't sound familiar. Sounds like a porno I might've watched, but those aren't real. They're just fiction, silly. Do you think girls
bend
like that? We do not. And most guys don't have giant wangle-rods the size of a fat baby's arm, either. You ever wonder how much Viagra those dudes have to pop to keep that shit going? Those porno dicks are pretty freaky looking, actually. That's the problem with porno these days. Too many close-ups. You can see every vein, every ingrown hair, every mole, crab, zit, cigarette burn–"

  "I want to know what it is you think you're doing." His façade doesn't crack. Smile so placid it drives her batty.

  "Standing here, soliloquizing – is that a word? – about pornography with some kind of girls' school karate-master. I bet those girls like having you for a coach. Don't they? Uh-huh. Real eye-candy."

  Blunter this time: "What do you want with Wren?"

  "To help her."

  "She has all the help she needs here."

  "Yeah. I don't believe institutions are all that helpful, honestly. Besides, this is not the kind of thing they can help with. This is something of an
edge
-case. Requires a
specialist
."

  "And you're that specialist."

  She winks, fake-kisses the air.

  His gaze flicks to the right, down the hall at the Tbone intersection, and Miriam follows his eyes–

  Coming out of a stairwell are Roidhead and Mario, security guards extraordinaire.

  "You called the cops on me," she says. "How sweet."

  "I'm very protective of my girls."

  She shakes her head. "
Now
who's the creeper?"

  Heavy footsteps – running now, not dawdling – come from the direction of the guards. She doesn't have to look. They're bolting toward her.

  Which means it's time for her to bolt, too.

  She breaks away down the hall, giving him the middle finger as she flees.

  The guards are hot on her tail.

  Up ahead, the cafeteria doors.

  The murmur of lunching students getting louder and louder.

  Perfect.

  Miriam gets to the doors and cuts a hard right, shouldering them open and darting into a cafeteria full of girls.

  
Fighting Dirty II:
Food Fight Boogaloo

 

This isn't your typical grade-school cafeteria.

  Girls sit at round wooden tables, not long ones of steel and laminate. Beneath their feet is a dusty old red carpet. Above their heads are not buzzing fluorescents but rather chandeliers with a warm golden glow.

  At the far end are the food stations. Drink machine. Buffet. A guy in a froofy white chef hat slicing prime rib like he's serving guests at the White House.

  The smells hit her: gravy and pizza and something sweet, something with apples and cinnamon. Hunger pangs tweak her gut.

  
I wish I had school food like this
, she thinks.

  No time to take it all in.

  Because her pursuers are upon her.

  As everybody stares, Miriam darts between tables.

  A younger 'tween in pigtails crosses in front of her with a tray. Stops, stares, a deer in headlights.

  Miriam moves right, ducking away from Roidhead's swiping hand as she hops up onto one of the tables and runs straight across it. Her foot lands on someone's plate and she almost loses her balance and busts her head but her arms pinwheel and her legs catch up with her body and somehow she recovers.

  She jumps to the ground. Flits past one girl just standing there like a dummy, past another loading books into her bag.

  The guards don't cross the tables. Mario (or is it Ron Jeremy?) is falling behind.

  Oh, what a week's worth of porn will do for your POV.

  Roidhead, though, this guy's a bull in a China shop. His elbows are knocking past girls left and right. Tables bump. Drinks spill. Girls shriek. He's got a vein sticking out on his bald head that looks big enough to grab onto with both hands – like the handlebars on a Huffy bike.

  Miriam grabs food off a plate, hurls it at his head. A chicken leg thuds dully between his eyes, then plops to the floor.

  She turns, slaps her chest. "What?
What?
You want a piece?"

  As he closes in, she kicks a chair in front of him.

  The exit is behind her. Red glowing sign. Emergency door.

  
There.

  She turns again, bolts for the door, pulls a rack of trays – all with old food spackled to them – behind her, and it collapses with a clatter.

  He leaps over it like a beefy, grunting gazelle.

  She turns to run toward the door.

  Just as a young girl is coming out of the cafeteria restroom–

  A black girl. Hole in her nose where a nose-ring once went. Her hair frizzy and wild, like she dipped her toe in a cup of water and then stuck it in a light socket.

  Her face pulses. The image of a skull, ochreous and watery as though bobbing in a jar of formaldehyde, floats over her face.

  As though projected there from afar.

  Miriam tries to avoid her, but the girl zigs when Miriam zigs, and she holds up her hands and Miriam holds up hers and–

  
Burning flowers. Orange oil. This time in a rusted husk of a burned-out school bus. The girl lies on the doctor's table. Same girl. Older by two years.

  
"She wrung her hands and groaned and cried

  
And gnawed her tongue before she died.

  
Her nails turned black, her voice did fail

  
She died and left this lower vale."

  
The song, sung. The man in the bird mask, the man with the swallow tattoo, here he is, axe in hand. He thrusts his foot down and locks the table brake to stop the table from rolling because the bus sits on a slight lean.

  
Barbed wire gag. Slashed Xs in the palms and the feet. All her hair's been cut off, clipped off into ragged puffs as though by an eyeless barber.

  
She screams as the man steps up onto the ruined bus seats to get into position.

  
He stands over her. Singing. Voice up and down. A man's voice. A woman's. A child's. Back again, warbling between them

  
"May this a warning be to those

  
That love the ways that Polly chose

  Turn from your sins, lest you despair

  The Devil take you without care."

  The axe falls heavy.

  
Her head hits the aisle between the bus seats, tumbles under the legs of the table toward the front of the vehicle. The man chases after it like a bird after a worm, giggling as though it's a game. The axe is no longer in hand but now a hooked blade. For cutting out tongues.

  –the two bodies come together and pull apart and Miriam feels like she's just been on an out-of-control carousel ride that's been going around and around and now she's dizzy and sick and doesn't know what way is up, down, left, right.

  She turns, woozy, and sees the EXIT door.

  Roidhead is on her like stink on spoiled meat.

  
Bam
. They crash through the exit. The door swings wide. Pigeons take flight as both bodies tumble out onto a concrete platform. They'd keep going and fall to the parking lot ten feet below if it wasn't for the green metal railing.

  It catches them like a net.

  Which gives Miriam all the opportunity she needs.

  She grabs for his head–

  
He's gone fat. His gut isn't just a spare tire, it's a tractor tire packed in forgotten mushy muscle and lumpy lipomas. He's forty-five now – it's over a decade since he worked at the school – and he pops the collar of his shirt and waddles down into the basement and there he sees his old friend: the weight bench. He regards it for a time like he's not sure, scratching his neck under the collar, but then he gives a what-the-hell shrug. With a grunt he shimmies himself under the bar, but it's no easy fit – like shoving a tomato under a closed door. Still, he manages. Gets those slick mitts under the bar. Lifts. The bar rattles, doesn't move. More sweat pops out on his brow like so many Whack-a-moles. He starts making a sound like he's trying to squeeze a baby out of his ass, and suddenly his eyes go wide, bulging like googly cartoon eyes, and the heart attack rips through him the way a grizzly bear would rip through a screen door–

  –and
whong
slams his skull hard into the metal railing.

  Roidhead makes a moosey sound, a bugling cry of inchoate rage, and wraps his big arms around her in a crushing grip. Her head pulses like a balloon filled with blood and getting bigger and bigger.

  She's got no wiggle room. It won't be long before Ron Jeremy, Italian Plumber, joins the fray. Probably with pepper spray or a stun gun. And then it's over.

  Roidhead's face leers into her own. He shows his teeth like an animal.

  Miriam cranks her head backward and smashes her forehead into his nose. It elicits a gurgling cry from her grappler – but, even better, earns her enough slack to wiggle free.

  As she clambers up over him, she leaps over the railing and breaks for the woods, churning on a heady rocket-fueled broth of adrenalin and nausea.

  Roidhead still back there, bent over, holding his face.

  Nobody behind her.

  Nobody but two dead girls. Headless. Tongueless. Feels like their ghosts are harrying her forward – the ghosts of two girls who aren't even dead yet.

  But she feels like she's being chased by a ghost. The ghost of not one girl, but two. Each headless. Each carrying their own tongueless heads.

  By the time she makes it to the guard gate, she's panting and hacking and wheezing – she tells herself it's all this awful clean air and not lungs shellacked with hardened tar and nicotine. By the time she makes it to the guard gate, she's panting and hacking and wheezing – she tells herself it's all this awful clean air and not lungs shellacked with hardened tar and nicotine. She lights a cigarette. The smoke fills her lungs. Clears her head.

  Homer looks out of the booth, watching her like she's some kind of funny squirrel or monkey escaped from the zoo.

  "You don't look so good," he says.

  "I feel great. Top of the pops. Total tits." She looks down beyond the gate, finally sees Roidhead galloping down the drive. She coughs again, blows a two-pronged swallow's tail of smoke from her nose. "Can I, uhh–"

  She gesticulates toward the gate. He nods, hits the button.

  They start to swing open.

  "Good seeing you again, Homer."

  "You too, Miss Black. Will I see you again?"

  A voice inside tells her:
You don't ever want to come back here again
. But then the faces of two living dead girls swim in the dark wet hollows of her mind.

  "Yeah. You probably will."

  He gives her a wave.

  And like that, Miriam is gone.

 

Miriam's in a mood. Were she a cartoon character, above her head would float an angry scribble of dark lines. Inked by a black pen that pushed too hard and left dents in the paper.

  She's in a booth at America's Most Mediocre Restaurant, nursing a glass of vodka. Todd – on duty again tonight, the innocent pizza-faced lamb that he is – went through their catalog of whiskies, and none of them were worth a shit.

  So, vodka. Clean. Nearly flavorless. Kicks like an ostrich.

  A shadow falls across the table.

  Miriam closes her eyes. Expects the waitress to appear except she'll probably have a bird head and from the bird's nose will drift curls of velvet smoke and the birdface will squawk something about dead girls and work to do.

  But it's Katey instead.

  The teacher sits.

  She's beaming. There's an energy about her. A flush to her cheeks.

  Miriam scowls over her vodka. "You look…" She blinks. "Pregnant. Like, they always say pregnant women get a glow. You look pregnant."

  Katey waves her off. "I'm not pregnant."

  "Yeah. I
know
. I'm just saying, that's how you look."

  "Well. You're in a bit of a mood."

  Miriam shows her teeth, bites the rim of her glass. Stares over the vodka like a feral dog guarding his bone.

  "Listen," Katey says, "if I have my math right, I've got 268 days of life left in me and I don't want to spend them unpleasantly."

  "Nngh. Fair enough. So, Teach, tell me. How
do
you plan to spend them?"

  Katey smiles. Not a fake smile. Maybe tinged with sadness but a smile just the same. "I don't really know yet."

  "Well, don't think on it too long." Miriam polishes off the vodka. Slides the empty glass to the edge of the table. "You're buying my vodka tonight. I don't actually have any money."

  Katey shrugs. "Okay. I'll buy you a meal too, if you want it."

  Miriam's stomach gurgles. She still feels unsettled, her gut a shallow pool of acid. Food might help. Or she might throw it up, but hell with it, it's not her money. She mumbles thanks.

  "Answer me something," Katey says. "You say I'm sitting there talking to someone when I die?"

  "Mm-hm. Big fella. Name of Steve."

  "I don't know any Steves. Well. There's my cousin Stevie, but he's a few years younger than me and not much bigger than a cricket."

  "I dunno. It's a future vision, and at some point in the future you meet some dude named Steve. And he's there when you… you know, take the great big cosmic dirt-nap."