Three Slices (23 page)

It’s John. He’s standing behind one of the wooden posts holding up the overhang here at the lodge. He’s got a crooked, hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “So?”

“I want one of those,” Miriam says.

“It’s weed,” he says.

“It’s not fucking weed. I know what weed smells like. It smells like a skunk that someone set on fire. That is high-grade tobacky of the non-wacky variety. And like I said, I fucking want one.”

He laughs. Pulls out a little Altoids tin, and starts fishing for a hand-rolled cigarette. “I never took much to marijuana.”

“Me neither, Grandpa.”

He hands her the cigarette. Lights it for her, sheltering the match flame from the wind. Paper crinkles as it burns. She inhales. Smooth, like velvet.

Her skin tingles. Her lungs pulse.

“No,” she says, blowing a jet of smoke from the side of her mouth. “The whackadoo didn’t tell me anything good. Just a number.”

“A number, huh? Phone number?”

“No. Only nine digits. So? Maybe a social. I dunno.”

He shrugs. “Sorry.”

“Yeah. Well. Life goes on.”

“About that.”

“About what?”

“Life. And its opposite.”

“You wanna know,” she says, a smile spreading across her face. The warm embers of satisfaction stir into a straight-up campfire in her belly. “That’s what this is. I see your face, John Q. Jerkenheimer or whatever your name is.”

“John Lucas.” He takes one last hit off his cigarette and then flings it into the parking lot—a pinwheel of orange sparks in the night. “And yes, I would very much like to know. Miriam. Go back in? Let an old hound buy you a drink?”

“I’m still not going to fuck you.”

“I still don’t want you to.”

“Then we’re good. Let’s go drink and explore the fun-tastic wonderland of one’s own encroaching mortality!” She takes a few more sucks off the cigarette—like velvet, this smoke—and then they head back inside to the bar. Sit down at a booth. Order a couple white whiskeys. Something that comes from a bottle that looks like a pig. Same bartender: Janice.

As she brings the two whiskeys, Janice says, “She’s not gonna do you, John. You know that, don’t you?” Then to Miriam: “You’re not gonna do him.”

“It’s not the plan, no,” Miriam says, then tips back the whiskey. It cuts a burning channel right down her center. Like a core of lava boring down through her heart. John just waves both of them off, and Janice gives one last wipe-down of the table before retreating. To John, Miriam says, “So. Why now?”

“Why now what?”

“The decision to see.” Part of her just wants to get into it. Grab his hand. Take the Grim Reaper’s bone coaster through John Lucas’s inevitable end. But her curiosity goes deeper than just his demise.

He sips at the whiskey. Winces. “Whiskey’s not my thing.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. I, ahh. I’ve been Army for a long time. Career. Or I thought. I was married. Have a son. The ex hates me. My son, well. He’s...” His voice trails off. Whatever he was going to say, he drowns with another taste of whiskey—this one a gulp, not a sip. “I think it’s just time to see what’s coming for me.”

“You want to see if it’s something you deserve.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Some people want to know how they kick off because... they think they can avoid it. Or because they like the idea of rubbernecking at their own death. It’s like a fantasy, because in their hearts, they don’t really believe that what I say I can do I can
really
do. You, though. You’re one of those other ones. The ones who want to know if the way they go out is earned. Like maybe you’ve been spending your whole life buying your death in increments. All your moments cashed in toward a very specific grave plot.” She finishes her own drink and feels for a second like she could breathe fire. She
urp
s into her fist. “What did you do in the military, John?”

He sniffs. “They called it, ahh, HIC.
Human Intelligence Collector
.”

“That sounds like something out of a horror movie.”

He stares off at a fixed point about a million miles away. “Yeah. Probably about right. Truth of the thing is, I tortured people for information.”

“Jesus.”

“And I wasn’t even the real deal. We just warmed up the poor bastards for the CIA. They’re the ones who came in and... well. We don’t know what they did, not exactly. They didn’t want us in the room and they didn’t record it, but, you know. You hear things. Half true, half something else, maybe. But even half true—even
one-tenth
of truth—that still gives me the piss shivers.”

Miriam lays her hand out on the bar table.

She turns the palm up.

“Well, John, let’s do this.”

He looks down at it. Suddenly scared. She thinks,
Don’t puss out on me now, dude. Give me my taste.

John draws a deep breath.

Then he reaches down and plants his hand in hers—

7. One Week Ago: Wicked Johnny

J
OHN
L
UCAS
has been tortured.

His palms cut into Xs.

His head wreathed in a crown of barbed wire.

Something painted on his chest in blood—blood now dried, blood brown like rust and earth, blood that must be his. Blood that forms a bird with wide wings and forked tail: a swallow.

A shape roams into view. A tall figure with a leather hood. A hood that dead-ends in an all-too-familiar guise: a plague doctor mask. Long bird beak with holes cut in it. No smoke drifts, though, no smell of burned roses or crisped carnation, no funeral-flower incense—just the shiny glass eyes, the beak, the hood.

The figure holds a hatchet. Brand-new. Like for camping. It’s all black. Matte. No shine. Just dull metal, swallowing the light.

“I’m glad I get to show you this,” says a voice from inside the hood. A woman’s voice. But someone else is there, too. Someone who stands behind it all, in the shadows, shifting from foot to foot. The hooded figure seems to be talking to this third person when she says: “You need to see this. You need to see what I’ve become.”

Then the hatchet rises.

Then the hatchet falls.

But it isn’t a clean strike. It’s clumsy. Awkward. It doesn’t take the head off, not like a heavy axe would—and so the Mockingbird lifts it and drops it again and again, chopping at John Lucas’s neck like it’s a stubborn branch or a bone in meat on the butcher’s block. Chop, chop. He screams. Thrashes. Until his screams are drowned. Bubbling, gurgling. Chop, chop. Soon, the head rolls off the table. Still attached by a strip of long, lean skin.

One last hack. Cleaving that skin strip.

The head hits the floor with a
thunk
.

This happens in one week.

8. One Week Ago: Fuck This Noise

—
AND THE
vision kicks her in the teeth.

She yanks her hand away.

“Shit,” she says.

He laughs a little like this is some kinda joke. “You okay? What’d you see? It’s nasty, isn’t it? Do I die on the toilet? My old man died on the toilet and—on the one hand, that’s probably a good place to go in case you let everything loose when you go, but dignified, it is not—“

She can barely hear him.

The Mockingbird Killer. Alive? Is that even possible? Of course it is. Because it wasn’t one killer. Carl Keener wasn’t just one branch: their legacy grew in the twisted roots and black branches of a whole family tree. Beck Daniels. Eleanor and Edwin Caldecott. Who knows where else those tendrils grew?

“I have to go,” she says.

“Wait—” He reaches for her. But his hand knocks over the whiskey—the glass rolls toward the edge of the table.

By the time it falls and shatters, Miriam is already halfway to the door.

9. Now: Mockery

T
HE WOMAN,
Melora, doubles over—because while it isn’t the same as a guy getting kicked in the soft, pliable sack that dangles between his legs, kicking a woman square in her lady-purse is no delight. Pain is pain, and this kind of pain is special—already the crazy bitch is clutching her middle as the feeling radiates up into her gut. She coughs. Winces.

On a resume, one of Miriam’s talents would be
seizes opportunities
. Which she does now, launching herself up like a starving housecat. Claws out. Teeth bared. She slams into Melora. Her arms around the psycho’s hips, head slamming right into the woman’s middle.

The two of them topple.

Miriam pistons a fist—Melora turns her head, takes it on the cheek—

A roar of river water, a flurry of bubbles, rushing, gurgling. Like being smothered by it. In her ears. Up her nose. Overwhelming. Pulling Miriam down
—

No vision. Just noise.
Melora is psychic
.

Real deal psychic.

Sister
.

Oh, god.

Miriam’s distracted, and Melora takes her shot—she flings her own elbow up, catching Miriam in the same place where the hatchet hit her moments ago. The ringing of a gong: everything vibrating, banging, cymbals going off in her head like someone sat an orangutan at a drum kit.

“We’re... not supposed to be fighting,” Melora stammers. She sounds sad, desperate, panicked. “We’re sis—”

Miriam pins her with her knees and then backhands her.

Whap
.

“We’re not fucking sisters,” Miriam hisses. “I don’t
have
a sister.”

“No, not like that,” Melora says, the fight gone out of her. Her hands fall flat to her sides, thudding against the floor. “You fell into a river. Down there, in the dark. I was there, too. I was drowning, too.”

Miriam almost laughs. “Jesus Christ on a Creamsicle. You really are nuts.” She remembers being down there in the dark of the river. The shadows moving. The water rushing. All the world sounding like blood rushing in a giant’s ear. Eleanor Caldecott there in the deep. Holding Lauren Martin—
Wren
. Other bodies down there, too. Ghosts. Visions. Not real. Right?

Beneath her, the woman makes a low, keening, grief-struck sound. “I’m so sorry, Miriam. I’m so, so sorry.”

For a half second, Miriam is like,
Sorry for what?
She’s about to ask, about to say,
This is what you wanted. This is who you are, some crazy Caldecott remnant who thinks she can hang with
...whoever the others were to her. Cousins, uncles, distant relations, lost brothers, blah blah blah.

But then—a sharp stick in the top of her thigh, just south of her ass cheek.

A needle prick.

Her gaze darts. She sees Melora’s hand there. Holding a small, disposable injector. She tries to read what’s on the side. Can’t. Vision already going smeary.

If I’m going dark, you’re coming with me
, she thinks, and reaches down to wrap her hands around Melora’s neck. The psycho’s eyes bulge. Tongue out. But then it’s like Miriam’s hands go soft. Disconnected. Like gloves that someone staple-gunned to the end of a pair of pool noodles. Can’t get a grip.

Everything starts to go slack.

Melora gives her a gentle urging. Protects her landing.

She doesn’t go out. She doesn’t fall unconscious. Her eyes stay open. Everything feels like it’s floating. The floor disappearing beneath her. The ceiling and roof drifting up into the star-scattered sky. Her breathing goes slow. Shallow.

Melora stoops down. A small, soft smile. “It was the only way,” she says.

10. Six Days Ago: Trespassers

M
ORNINGS,
M
IRIAM
thinks, can go eat a dick. They can go eat a dick salad with a few extra squirts of smeg-sauce. Topped with cock-waffles. Further topped with jizz syrup. All served in a roasty-toasty bowl of crispy, deep-fried dog shit. Mornings can eat all that, then jump off a cliff and into the mouth of an alligator. An alligator with a righteous case of irritable, inflamed, prolapsed bowels.

Fuck mornings.

For real.

Mornings mean the night is over. Mornings mean sleep is done, game over, goodbye. Mornings are the consequence of your actions, the culmination of the twenty-four–hour equation. They’re like being born all over again. Emerging into a bright, nasty, stupid world. Mouth tasting of ash. Eyes seal-coated with sleep-boogers. Hair looking like you just went ten rounds with the Devil hisownself.

The curtains to the rinky-dink motel room—a room that smells of must, and dust, and mold, all of it with a strange minerally tang like she’s down in the bowels of a silver mine somewhere—whip open suddenly.

They do this by someone’s hand other than her own.

A dark shape stands by them.

Which means,
Oh, god, did I fuck somebody last night?