Thunderbird

By Chuck Wendig

In the next installment of the suspenseful Miriam Black series, Miriam heads to the southwest in search of another psychic who may be able to help her understand her curse, but instead finds a cult of domestic terrorists and the worst vision of death she’s had yet.

Miriam is becoming addicted to seeing her death visions, but she is also trying out something new: Hope. She is in search of another psychic who can help her with her curse, but instead she experiences her deadliest vision to date in this latest “visceral and often brutal” (Publishers Weekly) series that is “wildly entertaining” (Kirkus Reviews).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781481448734

Chuck Wendig

Chuck Wendig is the author of the Miriam Black thrillers (which begin with Blackbirds) and numerous other works across books, comics, games, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the cowriter of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.

Book preview

PART ONE

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NONA DECIMA MORTA

ONE

THE QUITTER

Miriam runs.

Her feet pound asphalt. Ahead, Old Highway 60 cuts a knife line through red rock and broken earth, the highway shot through with hairline fractures. Big clouds scattered across the sky like the stuffing from a gutted teddy bear. The side of the highway is lined with gnarly green scrub brush, plants like hands reaching for the road, hands looking to rend and tear. Beyond, it’s just the wide-open nowhere of Arizona: electric fences that don’t contain anything, craggy rocks and distant peaks like so many broken teeth.

Run, she thinks. Sweat is coming off her hair, into her eyes. Fucking hair dye. Fucking spray gel hair bullshit. Fucking suntan lotion. She blinks back sweat carrying all those chemicals, sweat that burns her eyes. Don’t pay attention to that. Just run. Eyes forward. Clarity of thought and vision. Or something.

Then her foot catches something— a rock, a lip of cratered asphalt, she doesn’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because suddenly she pitches forward. Hands out. Palms catching the macadam, bracing herself so her head doesn’t snap forward and crack in half like a tossed brick. A hard pain jars up her arms, through her elbows like a flicker of lightning. Her hands sting and throb.

She gets up on her knees and then starts coughing.

The coughing jag isn’t brief. She plants her hands on her knees and hacks hard, and between hacks she wheezes, and between wheezes she just hacks harder. It’s a dry cough of broken sticks and dead leaves until it’s not— then it’s wet, rheumy, and angry, like her lungs have gone liquid and have decided to disperse themselves up and out of her mouth.

That mouth that wants a cigarette right now. Lips that would plant around the filter and suck smoke deep. Her whole body wants a cigarette, and the nic fit tears over her and through her like a plague of starving locusts. She shudders and bleats and laughs and cries and, once again, coughs.

Her palms pulse with her hummingbird heartbeat. The skin abraded.

Footsteps behind her.

Heavy. Boots hitting hard.

Sweat pours off her now— spattering on the road.

It’s hot, she gasps. "It’s fucking hot. It’s Hell-hot. It’s wearing-the-Devil’s-humid-scrotum-as-a-hat hot."

They say it’s a dry heat.

Louis clomps up alongside her like a Clydesdale.

She looks up at him. The sun hangs behind him, so he’s just a shape, a shadow, a black monolith speaking to her. Oh, Louis, she thinks, and then he turns just so and her eyes adjust. And she can see the black electrical tape crisscrossing his eyes. She can see his pale face, his wormy lips, a tongue that traipses over broken teeth. And when he moves, she hears the rustle of feathers, the clacking of beaks.

Not-Louis. The Trespasser. Her companion that only she can see— a hallucination, a ghost, a fellow traveler to wherever it is she’s going.

You know what else is a dry heat? she asks. Fire.

It’s only April.

It’s, like, almost ninety degrees. I should’ve come in December.

The Trespasser stands over her. Like an executioner ready to drop the head-chopper axe down on the kneeling sinner.

Why are we out here, Miriam?

She rocks back on her knees, cranes her head back, eyes closed. She paws at the water bottle hanging at her hip. With her teeth she uncaps it (and even there she thinks: my teeth want a cigarette too, want to bite into the nicotine like it’s a cancerous Slim Jim god I want it so bad I’d kick a baby seal just to get one taste), then drinks deeply, drinks sloppily. Water over her lips, down her chin.

Up in the sky, vultures spin on an invisible axis.

"We are not out here, she says, wiping her wet mouth with the back of her hand. I am out here alone. You are— well, we still don’t know what you are, do we? Let’s go with demon. Invisible, asshole demon. You’re not here. You’re here." She taps her temple, then drinks more water.

"If I’m up there, then I’m with you, and we are still we, he says. A loose, muddy chuckle in the well of his chest. Why are you jogging, Miriam?"

"It’s not jogging. It’s jogging when rich, limp-noodle assholes do it. When I do it, it’s called running, motherfucker. She sniffs. Coughs again. I do it because I need to get better. Get stronger. Faster. All that."

What are you running from?

You, she thinks. But instead she says, "It’s funny; anyone who sees me running asks me that. Hur hur, is something chasing you? Yeah. Death. Death is chasing me, and chasing everyone else, too. That’s what I’m running from. My own clock spinning down. The sweep of the Reaper’s scythe."

Not like you to run from death.

Things have changed.

Another damp, diseased chuckle. Oh, we know. You’re trying to get away from us. From you. From the gift you have been given.

It’s no gift, she says, finally starting to stand. The sun is punishing. It feels like a fist trying to punch her back down to the ground. But you know that. And you don’t care. She thinks, but does not say: As soon as I find the woman I’m looking for, you’re outta here, pal. No more trespassing for you. Miriam has a name: Mary Stitch. AKA, Mary Scissors. A woman who can, if the story is true, help Miriam get shut of this so-called gift. She wants it gone. She needs it gone before it swallows her whole.

You’re not done yet, the Trespasser says. As she stands, she sees Not-Louis’s eyes have become black, glossy circles— crow eyes, rimmed with puckered gray skin and the start of oily feathers that thread underneath the skin like stitches. Not by a country mile, little girl.

She sucks in a bit of sweat from above her lip and spits back at him. The Trespasser doesn’t even flinch. Instead, he just points.

Miriam follows the crooked finger.

There, way down the highway, she sees the glint of light off a vehicle. Her vehicle— it’s where she parked it. A rust-red, rat-trap pickup truck. A literal rat trap, actually— when she bought it, rats had made a nest in the engine, chewed up the belts and wires pretty good.

But then:

Another car.

This one, coming from the opposite direction. Hard to make out what it is— the sun catches on it like in a pool of liquid magma. Despite that, Miriam can see the back of the car fart out a noxious black cloud. She can hear the bang of the engine, and she can see something roll across the road— a hubcap?— that hits the tire of her Ford truck and drops. The car stops across from her truck.

Then all is still.

What is that? she asks. Who is that?

She turns to the Trespasser but he’s gone.

And yet his voice reaches her:

Go and see.

Shit.

TWO

NOT DONE YET

Miriam runs. Again. Because, apparently, she is a glutton for punishment. She tells herself that the quarter-mile or so between her and the two vehicles is psssh, pffft, no problem at all, but three steps in and her feet feel like they’re encased in cement and her calves feel like sausages about to split and spill their meat. Still, she runs. She tells herself it’s because she has to.

Ahead, the truck and the car roam into clearer view. Past the flinty, flashing sun. There, on her side of the road, the pickup: Ford F-250 from 1980. Rust has taken over most of the cherry red paint. Across the highway: a Subaru station wagon. An Outback. Also old— maybe ten years, maybe more.

She hears the engine tinking and clicking. A smell hits her— bitter, acrid, sweet. A charred fan belt, cooked antifreeze.

A hundred yards away now. The driver-side door to the Subaru pops open. A black woman steps out. She’s rough and ready— a stone whetted to a sharpened edge like a caveman’s axe. A survivor. Like Miriam.

As Miriam slows to a jog and then to a walk, the woman points.

Stay back!

The woman’s hand moves behind her, to the waistband of her jeans— she turns just so, and Miriam sees something back there. A gun. Tucked. The driver doesn’t pull it. Not yet.

Miriam holds up her hands, slows her walk. Hey. Yo. Relax. That’s my truck right there. No harm, no foul. Just gonna scooch on past, get in the truck, and go. Fifty yards now separate them. Maybe less.

The woman’s eyes flash from Miriam to the truck and back again.

Inside the Subaru station wagon: movement.

And that’s when Miriam gets it. Because she sees a small face, round and wide-eyed, peer over the dashboard. A boy. Young, maybe ten years old. Blue T-shirt with some red on it— the Superman logo, she realizes. Just the top of it. She’s a mother protecting her kid. Right?

Miriam thinks to ask if everything’s okay but her gut clenches: Just let it go. Don’t get involved. This is a trap. The Trespasser put her here— she doesn’t even know if it works like that but she doesn’t care. She just wants out, away, hasty la visty, crazy lady. And maybe the crazy lady wants away from her, too— Miriam must look like hell. Sweaty pits, chapped lips, pink-and-black hair matted to her forehead. But then her dumb mouth starts forming words and those words escape like canaries from open cages and she says, Do you need help?

You got a cell phone?

I . . . do. You want me to call somebody?

The woman leans forward like she’s about to pounce. I want you to give it here. I want that phone.

Miriam arches an eyebrow. Yeah, no.

I want the phone and the keys to the truck.

I will make a call for you and I will drive you somewhere.

Oh, I know where you’ll drive me. You ain’t taking my boy back. And then the gun comes out— a little thumb-dicked .38 revolver. Snubby, priggish nose pointed right at Miriam. The woman clicks back the hammer. Keys. Phone. Throw them over.

If I throw the phone, I’ll break it.

That seems to stun the woman, like she’s too panicked to think clearly and this tiny little hangnail has snagged the whole damn sweater, threatening to pull it all apart

Fine, the woman barks, irritated. "Fine. Just . . . just come over, and you can hand them to me. No nonsense. Don’t mess with me or I’ll put this in you." She thrusts the gun forward, as if to demonstrate. The woman doesn’t look like a killer, but she does look desperate— pushed to the edge. Miriam knows that people at the edge will do anything. Any dog trapped in any corner will bite.

Miriam creeps forward. Her body throbs. Even in the heat, she represses a chill. No idea what’s happening here. What’s driven this woman to this? She tries not to care. But the carapace she’s carefully crafted is cracked— makes Miriam weak. Her hand ducks into her pocket, pulls out the little burner phone and the pickup’s key ring. She jingles them like she’s trying to distract a cat.

Thirty yards.

Twenty.

C’mon, c’mon, the woman says, impatient.

Miriam knows she’s not going to give over the keys or the phone.

That’s all she knows, though. What happens next, she’s not sure.

Ten yards now, and Miriam slows her walk, tries to buy herself some time. You don’t have to do this. We can be pals. You take my truck and my phone and I might have to feed you to the coyotes, lady. I don’t know who you think I am or why I’d want to take your son—

The woman waves the gun. "You people need to leave us alone."

Five yards. She starts to hand over the keys and the phone—

Two minutes ago, Miriam’s whole body ached, but now, every cell is awake and alive and without any pain at all, juicing on the natural narcotic of hard-charging adrenaline. With her free hand the woman reaches across—

Miriam flings the keys. Not enough to hurt— or, at least, to do damage— but enough where a jingly-jangly projectile launched at the woman’s face will offer up the interference Miriam needs. Her gut check is right: this lady isn’t combat-ready. While desperate, she’s not trained to deal with distraction. The gun goes wide, the woman makes a sound—Nuhhh!— and Miriam grabs the gun wrist and slams it back—

THREE

SNIPE HUNT

There the two of them stand. Wrestling back and forth with the revolver. The key ring hits the ground with a cymbal crash. The strange lady’s cell phone takes a tumble too— spinning corner to corner until it hits the asphalt, cracking the outer case. Gracie throws a punch, tries to piston it into the woman’s side, but the crazy white bitch bends her body— the fist misses, and the woman catches it, twists it, pins Gracie’s hand like she pins the other one. But Gracie isn’t done. She won’t be taken again. She won’t let her son be taken again. Everyone is an enemy and she has to get free so she drives a hard knee up into the lady’s middle. Her finger does this involuntary squeeze and— the gun in her hand bucks, firing up at the sky, up at the gods, bang—gunsmoke plume and brimstone stink. Inside the car, Isaiah is screaming, pounding on the dashboard, face a mess of tears—

And then there’s another gunshot—

The strange lady staggers to the side, blood suddenly soaking through her white V-neck T-shirt, competing with the sweat under each armpit— and then she coughs up blood and drops. Gracie screams, looks at the gun in her own hand, wondering how she did this, trying to figure out how her pointing the gun at the sky somehow fired a bullet that killed the woman wrestling with her—

And then another gunshot rolls across the sky like thunder and Gracie’s head snaps to the side and all the thoughts she had and all the fears and all the love goes ejecting out her temple along with her blood and her brains and all the things that made her who she was.

FOUR

TAG, YOU’RE IT

It all starts to play out just like the vision. So much so and in such proximity, time-wise, that it feels impossible to Miriam— less like one of her visions and more like a funky case of déjà vu, except this particularly funky case ends in her death and the death of the woman in front of her.

That happens in about thirty seconds.

Panic throttles her. Everything seems to slow. The woman—a woman Miriam now knows is named Gracie, thanks to the vision of death that comes any time Miriam touches her skin to the skin of another— throws the punch and Miriam, as if just playing back a recording of what was always going to happen, ducks it, catches the wrist, and slams it against the Subaru.

Inside, the child starts to cry.

She doesn’t know how to stop this.

This thing of hers— this power, this unrequested burden—has rules.

One of them is: she can only stop death by causing death.

Want to stop a murder? Then the killer must first be killed. The books have to be balanced. The ledger made square. And now an absurd and horrible thought runs through her like a rampant infection:

Maybe I kill the woman first.

Kill Gracie, interrupt the cycle, get out of the way.

She thinks this even as she tries to pull away, tries to hit the ground, but Gracie’s knee does what it was predestined to do, and it drives up into Miriam’s middle— oof— and blasts the air out of her.

Everything goes spinny, like she’s a little kid on an office chair whirling wildly about. The revolver starts to drift downward and she points it upward, and Gracie’s finger does that involuntary twitch and bang. Goes off. To the sky. To the clouds, the gods, the vultures—

The vultures.

Fear assails her. She doesn’t want to do this. The last time she did it, she entered the mind of a hungry seabird called the gannet— not just one bird but many, a ravenous flock of the scissor-beaked motherfuckers— and saved her mother’s life by tearing apart a man named Ashley, a man who hunted her and opposed her at every turn. She still has nightmares about it.

But now she has no choice. Even as she tries to resist it, she knows that reflex, knows that all the cells inside her body are screaming to survive, a chorus of save us, save us, do what you must and then her eyes close and there’s this vacuum sound—shoop— and it’s like being on a super-fast elevator rocketing to the top of a skyscraper. And next thing she knows, she’s not Miriam anymore. She’s not even on the ground— she’s in the sky, turning on an invisible axis, soaring on vectors of heat pushed up from the Arizona desert.

FIVE

THE WIDENING GYRE

Behold the black vulture.

A big bird, the black vulture: the one in which Miriam finds herself is bigger than most, with a wingspan of five feet—like a reaper cloak cast wide— and weight coming up just shy of ten pounds. Others like it wheel about the sky, and Miriam finds her mind in those, too. Fragmented like a punched mirror— pieces of her scattered. Turning, turning.

It is believed to be a carrion bird, the black vulture. And that is true, to a point: humans are poor janitors of the world they inherited. A car strikes a deer: nobody comes along to clean its smashed skull and spackled guts off the road. Or an armadillo or a marmot. Or even just garbage tossed out a window— garbage that maybe stays where it landed, or maybe gets picked up and put in a bigger pile: a garbage dump miles away. Vultures are glad to be the janitors that humans will not be. Eating what is left. Gorging. They will even do this for human remains: the Old World vultures eat the corpses left in the sky burials of Tibet, or on the Towers of Silence in Zoroastrian practice, thus releasing the soul from the body. (The vultures care little about souls and care very much about eating.)

In fact, the black vulture’s head is featherless for just such eating. Its wrinkled, scrotum-like scalp can plunge all the more easily into a carcass with nothing to halt its entry or its exit— the bird sticks its entire head inside the animal, beak and eyes and everything, feasting on all the best bits hidden from view.

But it is a mistake to think of the black vulture as only a carrion bird.

The vulture is a bird of prey.

Cattlemen know it. They know that when a calf is pushed from its mother’s body, all knobby-kneed and snot-slick, a wake of vultures (for vultures are very social birds) will descend on the newborn calf.

They will kill it. They will peck out its eyes. They will rip off its nose or tear out its tongue. They will stab at it with their hooked beaks, tearing it, ripping it, until it goes into shock and they may feast with comfort.

They can do this with many small or newborn creatures.

Vultures will eat the dead. But they also like to kill.

Unlike turkey buzzards, the black vulture relies on sight to spot prey, and were this a wooded area, they might not be able to spot the man in desert fatigues below— but they do, because they have good eyes. He moves. The sun flashes in the flat of the scope, the bolt of the rifle.

Distantly, Miriam thinks: ten seconds.

It’s like a rope, invisible around the vulture’s neck. Yanking it downward. And when this one dives, so do the rest of them. Wings back in a sharp V— long neck and featherless head craned forward, talons thrust down.

Wind whipping.

One vulture, then three, then seven.

Seven birds and nine seconds.

Tick-tock.

The man— broad-shouldered, pot-bellied, a scruff of beard on his face so patchy it might as well be half another man’s beard glued to his cheeks, aviator sunglasses capturing light— he must hear the ripple of feathers.

He looks up. Mouth open in shock. The rifle clatters to the flat rock on which he lies, and he staggers backward, reaching for a pistol at his hip—

Another distant thought from Miriam, a grim reminder that once again, this thing she does has rules and one of the rules is that fate is elastic— it likes to snap back to its shape even when it bends and stretches, and just because the man dropped his gun that does not mean he will not again pick it up and again complete the circuit that fate has made. He can still kill Miriam. He can still kill Gracie.

Maybe even the boy.

And so, he must die.

He takes a step backward, raises the pistol—

The vulture has a peculiar defense mechanism. Miriam did not know this but now she does (she suddenly knows way more about vultures than she ever anticipated, thanks to inhabiting one): the vulture has a septic mouth, a toxic gullet, a belly full of half-digested mess that was already rotten before it entered the vulture’s body and has only stewed in the decomposition inside the cistern of the bird’s horror-show stomach—

And it can regurgitate those contents at will.

Translation: the black vulture uses its vomit as a weapon.

Here, seven vultures do just that thing. Beaks open. Throats bulging. Hot, disgorged vulture barf— a scalding, acidic, sour gut slurry— launches forth, striking the man in the face. The pistol barks a shot. The bullet goes wide.

The first vulture, the leader of the wake, hits him like a train to the chest. Talons ripping into the buttons of his fatigues. He topples backward. His head strikes a rock. Skull breaking. A hooked beak plunges into the soft meat of his nose. More birds land upon him. Talons tearing fabric. Beaks poking in through the rent clothing, seeking skin.

His body begins to shake as it is disassembled. His foot kicks out, knocks his rifle off the rock. The pistol in his hand slides away with a clatter. Trauma rocks through his body. Death descending upon him in a rippling flurry of rot-stink wings.

SIX

BACK IN BLACK

Eyes shut. Her jaw works. Her tongue flattens against the roof of her mouth and she can taste the septic puke taste, and she can taste the hot coppery jets of blood and the fatty strips of human meat and then her eyes are popping open like the doors of a cuckoo clock before she rolls over onto her hands and knees.

She, of course, pukes.

What comes out of her is mostly just water. And the remnants of a granola bar. But she half-expects to see a human finger or a pair of aviator sunglasses clatter against the road.

Miriam feels for the water bottle. Not much left, but it’s something. She takes a gulp, swirls it around. Cheek bulge, swish

Reviews for Thunderbird

[billiebook · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I wasn't a huge fan of the plot about the Coming Storm, but, damn, I love Miriam in all her jagged brokenness.

[quondame · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The characters, plot, and intensity remain as good as the first 3, but the pacing stumbles because the flashback chapters are more interesting than the current time plot.

[Aimee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In book #4 of the series Miriam continues to grudgingly lean on some of our favorite side characters but also does a fair bit of 'leveling up' in terms of her powers. Much more of that is explored, which is deeply satisfying for us readers. While I'm 5-staring it because the series is truly spectacular, this book in it wasn't my absolute favorite. It was still great, but I felt like a little of the ending was less of a crazy explosion of excitement as it was a sort of 'ok and now we're getting on to the next' kind of thing.

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm a regular reader of John Scalzi's blog on which he showcases books written by other people by asking them to tell about the big idea that lead to them writing the book. So, a few months ago, I read Chuck Wendig's Big Idea piece about this book. And I knew I had to read it.This is the fourth book in a series about Miriam Black, a woman who knows how people die when she touches them, but I had not read any of the previous books and Wendig is skilled enough about giving the back story that I didn't feel I was missing anything. In this book Miriam is tired of her superpower (if that's what it is) and is on the trail of a woman, Mary Scissors, who can supposedly tell her how to get rid of it. She believe Mary is in Arizona so that's where she is. She is accompanied by her friend Gabby who is lesbian and who would like to be more than a friend to Miriam but takes what she can get. Miriam is out running on the side of a highway when she sees a car break down just opposite her truck. A black woman gets out and when Miriam gets near she asks for her phone which Miriam isn't about to give her. Then the woman pulls a gun and that's when things get weird. See, in addition to Miriam power to be able to see how people die she also can inhabit the mind of a bird and direct other birds. As Miriam and the woman struggle for the gun another shot grazes Miriam from a sniper in the desert. Miriam instantly snaps into the mind of a vulture hovering above and directs it and all the other vultures to target the sniper. Turns out vultures can kill, not just eat already killed animals, so the sniper is "dead meat" before long. Miriam goes back into her body but she is too late to stop the woman and her little boy from taking her phone and her truck. The sniper is part of a right-wing militia group who wanted the little boy because he also has superpowers. Miriam doesn't want to get caught up with this group but she learns that Mary Scissors is somehow affiliated with them. If she wants to have Mary "cure" her she needs to stop the militia. It's a tall order.In his Big Idea piece Wendig said that when he wrote the book two years ago he thought the big idea was about a far-right charismatic leader who thinks the country is going to be ruined by people coming into the US from Mexico or from overseas. Now that it has been released that idea "seems like a thing less out of fiction – or, at least, less a thing at the fringes and the margins – and is now a very real infection slithering right to the heart of American life and discourse". And that's what grabbed me. Hopefully it won't take a woman with superpowers to defeat this infection. Interestingly, I not that the Winnipeg Public Library has categorized this book as fiction, not science fiction. Maybe they think it hits too close to home for the latter category.

[ralphd00d-325171 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I'm so glad there was another book in this series! looking forward to maybe yet another one.....